“C’est un spectacle triste, un homme sans ses vêtements, je trouve…” I hear my mother whisper, as if unaware that she is thinking aloud. “Ça me semble si slovenly. Surtout quand il n’est pas, comme on dit, excité…” She looks at me, as if seeking confirmation, and I glance up somewhat taken aback, as are a couple of soldiers peering at us over their shoulders and laughing as they give each other a dig with their elbows.
And we must look odd in our coats that are far too heavy for the season. It is the beginning of September 1917, a Wednesday, and a warm late-summer afternoon, but we seem to be dressed for a harsh winter, in those coats of tough, indestructible material which the aunts made for us when it became clear that we would not be able to return home soon. When it occurs to me that the big bag that my mother has placed at her feet also contains a pair of boots as large as frigates, I can’t control myself either and have to giggle.
She turns round, grabs the bag by its large handles and asks what there is to laugh about.
“Nothing, Maman. I think we have to go this way…”
“Fancy a drink, Miss?” a voice calls after us, but she pretends she has not heard anything and gives a tug on the bag like a coachman tightening the reins of his horses.
We walked on along the promenade, among the soldiers spread out over the beach to enjoy the evening sun. No one seemed to hear the constant rat-tat-tat of the light artillery in the background, on the plain behind the line of dunes, and the rumbling farther away, the echoes of the cannon, both out at sea and deeper inland. The growl of an aircraft made a few heads look up, but the plane was too far away to be seen, and when a little later crackling erupted and here and there white smoke clouds burst open in the azure, someone shouted: “That’ll teach ’em, bloody Boches…” followed by laughter; but apart from that everyone continued as normal, and the sentries in the dunes remained motionless in the silver-green marram grass. She wasn’t interested; she wanted to go to the hospital. Again she pulled roughly at the bag.
I can still feel the violence of that gesture pulling through my forearm into my shoulders. All states of mind that were considered too violent or too coarse for a lady — rage, passion, lust for revenge — she accommodated in a deaf-and-dumb language of her own making, a vocabulary of twists and turns and looks. Only later did I begin to grasp the hidden syntax of her gestures and could I read the restlessness in them, the despair, the disappointment I must have evoked in her, after I had, however inevitably, bitten through the last umbilical cord still joining us. I myself only tasted the feeling of desolation that wells up when a descendant goes her own way with my own daughter. I felt humiliated by the ruthless pragmatism of life, which in our youth lionizes us, but one fine day drops us like a toy that has lost its shine. Naturally I reproached my child with all kinds of things, and I regret it now. September is still the time of year when that regret is at its ripest. It has assumed the colours that the early autumn sun imposes on the world at that season, and it hangs like a heavy travel bag between me and the dead. Its elusive weight seals our union.
I could not live without the dead, believe me, Rachida, my girl. I would feel empty if I could not fill their goblets with my funereal gifts: words that I put in their mouths, which I pour as libations over their altars.
How strange that she, who did not believe in a higher realm and practised a mainly dutiful piety, probably so as not to be out of step, ascribed a kind of hereafter to the dead — because if they really are nowhere any more then we no longer need to show any respect to their absence. If we do, God is still in us, a ponderous emptiness that turns round and round in our caverns. He counts the days and waits in boredom for the handful of hymns with which we might evoke Him. It is purely a matter of vocabulary, or as my mother invariably said to me when we squabbled: “For goodness’ sake stop turning words on their heads, Hélène. Soon you’ll be taking the world off its hinges and the poles will change places…”
I could make her descend from eternity, let her trickle down onto this sheet of paper in order to reprimand me posthumously for my digressions, but I won’t. I recall her as we lay together in that bed, in that attic room in the hotel on the promenade in De Panne that served as a hospital. When the shooting stopped the sun had already set and we could no longer go out in the street to find lodgings, so we had been assigned a room in the roof, a room for nurses on night shift, who would only be coming to bed towards morning.
“It’s not the Ritz, I know,” Miss Schliess had said, the sister who had to take us upstairs, when she saw my mother looking around her in the narrow room with thin wooden planks for walls, and the two small iron beds under the dormer window, with a few knick-knacks on the window sill, a small vase, a few shells, an empty glass. It could have been a servant’s room, Emilie’s magpie’s nest under the rafters at home.
My mother put her bag on one of the beds and whispered: “Thank you, ma soeur. My daughter and I are very grateful to you.” She had opened the bag, taken out a small handkerchief and dipped it in the basin which stood on a narrow washstand in a corner of the room under a mirror, and sat down on the chair between the two beds with the wet cloth in her hands.
“Perhaps Madam would like a nice cuppa…”
“Would you like some tea, Maman?”
She shook her head, and muttered: “Please go” and pushed her face into the wet handkerchief.
She looked pale, that evening, and was still trembling from the after-effects of the shock. We had scarcely been able to have a brief glimpse of my brother, in one of the long huts that had been built around the old boarding house, before we had to leave him again.
He was asleep when the orderly took us to him. In the bed next to his a man with lots of cream on his hair, which was combed in a strict centre parting, had been observing us.
“Il a eu de la chance, celui-ci,” he had said. “Il dort beaucoup, pauvre type… It does no harm of course. Un bon sommeil, no one has ever been the worse for that.”
My mother had nodded and listened intently to my brother’s breathing: deep, peaceful, regular. He was more or less unrecognizable because of the thick bandage round his head, which left only a tuft of hair on the crown free. A second covered the whole right side of his face apart from his eye and a third surrounded his neck and right shoulder. Under his pyjama top his trunk was also hidden by gauze and bandage.
She had opened her bag, retrieved a tin of biscuits from it, a couple of apples and a small bottle of wine, and put everything on the bedside table. We hadn’t paid attention to the fact that meanwhile the noise of the guns had grown louder and louder. Nurses were walking to and fro between the beds and the rustle of their long blue dresses and white caps and the energetic cadence of their steps on the floorboards made a nervous impression.
Outside there had been whistling, then a bang — the beams and the wooden floors trembled. The sisters did not seem so much nervous because of the shooting as concerned about the patients; and when, quite close to judge by the intensity, there was a second bang, loud, dry, more a vicious hiss than an explosion, one of the patients, a few beds farther on, had started whining and another, on the other side of the long ward, had jumped up from the sheets, meanwhile tugging at the buttons of his pyjama top as if in a trance. A couple of orderlies tried to calm him down and to button up his pyjamas again, while the nurses attempted to calm the other man in bed — he was all arms and legs and shrank into a ball when a new thud sounded.