War and Turpentine Read online

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  But during those years of stalling and suppressed guilt, something came to light that only seemed to make the matter more urgent. My uncle, having come by to help my father replace a few rotting boards in the old parquet floor of the front room, found, in the dust at the darkest end of the crawl space below, a gravestone. He called to my father to join him, and the two men crept over to the stone on their hands and knees, lighting their way with a flashlight. It was the gravestone of my grandfather’s mother. I heard my father say, Well, I’ll be damned. So that’s where he hid it! They dragged the heavy stone to the trapdoor and lifted it out. Even then, I didn’t fully understand the situation. My grandfather had died some ten years earlier, and I couldn’t see why anyone would hide a gravestone in the farthest corner of a crawl space, in the apparent conviction that it would never see the light of day again. Years later, I noticed that my father had mounted the stone on an ivy-covered wall of the garden with heavy metal brackets, about three feet from the ground, behind the old garage where he used to park his car. For the first time, I read the inscription carefully:

  PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF

  CELINA ANDRIES

  B. 9 AUG. 1868

  D. 20 SEPT. 1931

  WIDOW OF

  FRANCISCUS MARTIEN

  WIFE OF

  HENRI DE PAUW

  Two notebooks lie before me. The first is small and thick; the edges of the pages are stained red. Its cover is light-gray linen, as if it had been fitted with a prewar tweed jacket. The second one is larger, almost the size of a modern legal pad, and has an old-fashioned marbled cardboard cover, a bit like the faux marbling he loved to paint on walls. In the first notebook, he recorded his memories of growing up poor in Ghent and some of his experiences in the First World War.

  He was seventy-two when he started using the notebook—the date is May 20, 1963—possibly so that he could go on telling the story of how his life had been deformed, relatives had grown tired of his anecdotes and would cut him off, saying, I’ve heard that one often enough, or I’m tired, I’m off to bed, or I have to go now. His wife, Gabrielle, had died five years earlier; somehow, through the act of writing, he completed his period of mourning. His firm handwriting hardly evolves in this first notebook. Usually writing in midnight-blue ink, he strings his stories together cheerfully, with a flood of memories from his days in a gray provincial town—I can still picture his Waterman fountain pens on the small nineteenth-century dressing table that he’d painted in fanciful wood-grain patterns in the hope of making it look a bit antique. The original marble tabletop must have cracked; the clumsily attached wooden replacement is slightly too small. He wrote at this small dressing table for years, even though it was too high and he sat uncomfortably. The table, with its simple drawer smeared with colorful streaks of oil paint, is here behind me in the room where I am writing; I still keep the two notebooks in it. The second notebook, which he started because he regretted having described the humiliating poverty of his childhood in such copious detail, opens by explaining that he had put too many personal anecdotes into his first notebook and would have to start afresh, this time confining himself to his memories of the war. Besides, he had come to the end of the first notebook after only six months.

  He writes, My war diary is more than half filled with tedious stories of childhood and scores of irrelevant pages. Now I shall write only about the war, truly and sincerely, not to glorify it. So help me God. Only my experiences. My horror.

  So he summarized a number of stories he’d already told, adding fresh details here and there, and went on until 1919. The second notebook contains some of the traumatic scenes on the Yser, the particulars of his wounds, his recovery periods in England, and the discovery of the fresco in Liverpool that meant so much to him. After the year he was shot for the second time, he becomes more terse, because the descriptions of his squalid life in the trenches can only be repeated so many times, the scenes of killing rats with your bare hands and roasting them over a fire in the night, the cries of wounded comrades, fumbling with rolls of barbed wire in the mud as your hands bleed, the rattle of machine-gun fire, the bursting of shrapnel shells, and the eruptions of soil and torn-up limbs. But he lingered over his third stay in England—in Windermere, in the Lake District. In the final pages of this second notebook, when he comes to the personal tragedy he experienced a year after the war, during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919, his handwriting disintegrates. Yet despite this loss of discipline, his tone as a narrator remains surprisingly reserved. The lines in this section cross the page diagonally, teetering to the left and to the right; sometimes he returns to his old, regular script, and sometimes it all goes reeling. He must have been well into his eighties by the time he laboriously scrawled the final pages. By that stage he was writing with ballpoint pens in different colors, and his eyesight had greatly deteriorated—as far as I’m aware, he never bought a new pair of glasses in the decades that I knew him, and he may hardly have been able to see the page he was agonizing over. Seventeen years of work on six hundred manuscript pages in total. His memory was still so clear and retained so many details that I believe some form of post-traumatic clarity must have been at work; the details in the second notebook, laid beside the first one, show that he descended ever deeper into the trenches of recollection. All his life, he could not escape those details, not the fluttering leaf at nightfall just before he yet again stared death in the face, nor the image of his dead comrades, the smell of the mud, the mild wind over the blasted countryside in the first days of spring, the scraps of a blown-up horse in a bullet-riddled hedge. On the last page, there is a stain where liquid seems to have soaked through the paper; on one side of the gap is the word night, on the other the word panic.

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  I gave myself time to absorb what I had read and then began numbering the pages and noting the scenes where the first and second notebooks overlapped. It took me almost a year to type up his memoirs, and in the process I gained insight into how the many events and suppressed stories were interrelated. It was taxing work: on the one hand, I was at a disadvantage, because I could not reproduce his combination of old-fashioned grace, awkwardness, and authenticity without falling into mannerism; and on the other hand, when I adapted his long-winded narrative into a modern-day idiom, I felt as if I were betraying him. Even correcting the often endearing errors in his writing filled me with a vague sense of guilt. This task confronted me with the painful truth behind any literary work: I first had to recover from the authentic story, to let it go, before I could rediscover it in my own way. But time pressed harder than ever, and somewhere in my head the idea had lodged that I must finish the job before the centennial of the Great War, his war. My struggle with his memories.

  Like a clerk, I ploughed through the hundreds of handwritten pages, cursing my own mediocre style, the result of my equivocal attempt to remain faithful to him while nevertheless translating his tale into my own experience. Then I compiled an index of scenes and key words, made a list of the places I needed to visit, had the notebooks copied for fear they might be lost, and locked them away in a fireproof safety deposit box. I spoke with the few remaining survivors, who could tell me just a few uncertain details. I asked my father, his son-in-law, who by this time was living alone in the house on the riverbank, to write down everything he could recall; still clear-headed and energetic in his nineties, he helped me find the glue I needed to put the fragments together, to take the apocryphal versions that my grandfather had cheerfully strewn about for decades, hold them up against the versions in the notebooks, and learn to see everything in truer proportions.

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  When I look at the old dressing table here behind me, I see a small, stocky figure who exudes an unparalleled intensity. His bright blue eyes still twinkle, more than thirty years after his death, under a scalp wreathed in thin white hair, a bit like that famous photograph of the aged Arthur Schopenhauer: tough, outsized personalities that could no longer exist, we te
ll ourselves, because life has lost the spartan sobriety that allowed their temperaments to ripen and flourish. I can still hear his booming voice, his infectious crescendos, the tessitura of his stories, but no longer the specific words or sentences. There are the scents that clung to him: the smells of an old-fashioned painter, and something undefined, his scent, his one-time physical presence in the world, distant from the moment when I write this. Now that he has receded in time like the figures in ancient myths and stories, he has become tangible in an entirely new manner, in the way of an intimate history. And when I search for traces of his life, and am usually thrown back on my own devices because almost everything has vanished, I wonder, time and again, what it is that connects us to our grandparents in this ambivalent way. Is it the absence of the generational conflict between parents and children? In the yawning gap between our grandparents and ourselves, the battle for our imagined individuality is waged, and the separation in time permits us to cherish the illusion that a greater truth lies concealed there than in what we know of our own parents. It is a great and powerful naïveté that makes us thirst for knowledge.

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  Strange as it may seem, there were details of my own world that never offered up their historical secrets until I read his memoirs: a gold pocket watch shattering on the tile floor; an oval cigarette from a silver case, smoked in secret, which made me nauseous when I was fifteen years old; a worn reddish-brown scarf on one of the discarded cupboards in the dilapidated greenhouse, covered with the thin droppings of the disoriented blackbirds that would throw themselves against the glass in panic until by chance they escaped through the open vent; a little old-fashioned shaving kit, silver in color, giving off the penetrating odor of alum and antiquated soap; a folder from Liverpool unfolded and refolded so often it had torn along the creases; the small metal box containing his medals and decorations, which I did not find until years after his death; the brass casing of a heavy shell, which he kept on the newel post and carefully polished every week, and which I had mistaken throughout my childhood for some kind of squat vase for flowers.

  Time gradually unraveled my grandfather’s secret for me—the story of his long life, most of which had been a mere epilogue to his practically medieval childhood, the horrors that filled his young manhood, and the true love he found and lost after the war. It was a story of dogged resignation, excruciating forbearance, childish daring, inner struggle between devotion and desire, endless murmured prayers as he kneeled with his hat on the pew beside him, his white-wreathed head bowed before countless figures of saints and flickering candles in shadowy houses of worship—the passionate inner life of a world that appeared on the surface to be anything but stirring.

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  I roam the streets of the city where I was born, which I see through very different eyes now that I’ve lived elsewhere for more than a decade. It’s a cool spring day with clouds of the kind he liked to draw. The old facade of the bicycle shop where I got my first red bicycle is still there, but the letters have faded. Bourgeois houses stand in a forlorn row along an asphalt road that has little to do with the life of ease for which they were designed and built. It starts to drizzle; lines of cars crawl down Heirnislaan. It must have been close by, the lightless alley where he spent his early childhood, with a switchyard on one side and a canal on the other. These days Heirnislaan is part of the city’s beltway; back then, it was an elegant avenue, shaded by dense foliage in the summer, when the “young ladies of the haute bourgeoisie,” as he respectfully called them, would titter as they peered through the windows of their light calèches at the ashen-faced guttersnipes who showed up on Sunday afternoons to gape at them. On misty winter mornings, he crossed Heirnislaan in his clogs, like the young hero of a Dickens story, toting a large bucket, on his way to beg coal from the jet-black men who loaded the tenders of the locomotives behind Dampoort railway station. Back at home, he’d set down the heavy bucket behind the coal stove, where his mother, when she returned exhausted from working for a bourgeois family in some other part of town, would be delighted to see that they could heat the house and eat a cooked meal that evening. Then he’d skip straight off to school, where he would be scolded for tardiness. His sisters made fun of him because he struggled to keep up in mathematics and languages. Somewhere along the side of the railway line, on a slope overgrown with butterfly bushes and elder, he had once planted a grain of maize, coming back every day to give the young shoot water from a dented bowl, until he found it snapped and torn off—a scene he describes with the gloomy reflection that “bit by bit, our family was left isolated in that alley.”

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  I pass the uninspired apartment buildings where the Ghent livestock market once stood; the memory of the place lives on in me like a potent smell. The old livestock market was a covered hall with regularly spaced iron pillars beside which stomping bulls tugged at their chains, their eyes bloodshot, saliva dripping from their mouths. Watery blood flowed through the trampled straw under the cutting tables, and the formless, light pink mounds of stacked lungs seemed slippery with life. The hearts lay piled next to the tongues, the heads were sold by weight, and the eyes that watched you from the copper pan of the “steelyard” (my grandfather used the old word for the butchers’ scales) seemed to gaze, meditative and glassy, from beyond the borders of death, which was all around, a death closer to the heart of life than anything I, innocent of war, have ever experienced. I expect that thoughts of this old livestock market sometimes leaped to mind, unbidden and revolting, when he witnessed the slaughter along the banks of the Yser, thoughts of innards poking out, of borders transgressed—the borders within which life should be safe from the grasping claws of death. The mix of panic and resignation in the eyes of the sheep waiting to be slaughtered was blithely overlooked by the sellers. It was a placid time in a provincial town around 1900; everything had its place; that penniless ragamuffin, my grandfather, strolled from table to table, knowing that if he could show a touch of childish sadness in his deep blue eyes, sooner or later they were bound to toss him something: a few ounces of blood pudding, a sloppily boned rib still good for soup, or a scrap of stringy meat to boil for broth. Later, when the two of us were looking at art reproductions and came to Rembrandt’s slaughtered ox, he said, “He painted this one so well you can smell the livestock market.”

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  His mother, Céline Andries, had had the privilege of going to secondary school, he writes. Her parents—grain and potato merchants, like his future in-laws—had sent their daughter to Piers de Raveschoot, a chic private school for girls, which in the nineteenth century was affordable only to the wealthy elite. She spoke not only Dutch but also French and English, she could recite poems by Prudens Van Duyse from memory, and she read Hendrik Conscience’s The Lion of Flanders, which won her over to the Flemish Movement. During her studies, she had spent time “in service,” as a housemaid for an aristocratic family in the Potter de Veldewijk, an outlying neighborhood of Antwerp. There she had become acquainted with the lifestyle of the upper classes and acquired an air of dignified reserve, which she never lost. She must have been a woman of exceptionally strong character; my grandfather’s admiration for her was utter and absolute. In his memoirs, he writes of her with a mixture of detached love and warm affection.

  His father, Franciscus Martien, was a “church painter,” a talented lower-class youth Céline had met one day when she entered her parish church and inadvertently walked into his ladder, almost knocking down the lowly painter, who had just been restoring the fourth Station of the Cross. Before I read the notebooks, it had always been a mystery to me how they could have met, and though my grandfather shrugged off my questions with a laugh, he wrote down the story with love. When she accidentally bumped into his ladder, something must have fallen off the top, just missing her: a brush, a palette knife, one of the tools he hung from his belt—it’s not clear. It clattered on the stone floor of the empty church;
the young woman looked up and saw the startled man about to lose his balance; the ladder tilted away from the wall for an instant, forcing him to throw his weight against it as quickly as he could to keep from plummeting. A smile crept over her stern face, and she walked on. She sat and prayed next to the two candles burning for the Blessed Virgin and later said it was as if those two small flames were their souls quietly burning side by side. An encounter between a scruffy young man and a statuesque young woman in an empty, silent church—in their day, it was not often that young people met without chaperones. He looked down, saw the black lace mantilla draped over her long, straight shoulders, descended the ladder, and waited for her, shyly and awkwardly, at the gate. She shot him a brief glance as she brushed past him: ironic, light gray eyes, as if she were pouring clear, cold water over his soul. Light gray eyes, but black hair—that must have caught his attention as a painter; it’s a rare combination, a category of beauty, my grandfather liked to say in later years, and he knew what he was talking about.