War and Turpentine Read online

  The encounter left Franciscus reeling—for weeks, he awaited the return of the dark apparition in vain, becoming desperate, feverish, and ill. He stayed home from work for a few days, until the curate came to inform his parents that Franciscus would lose his job if he did not go back. When Céline finally reappeared, on an ordinary weekday when most people have no time to go to church, he knew she had come for him. Reading between the lines of my grandfather’s story, it’s obvious this must have sent her family into an uproar. They would not have embraced the idea of their well-bred daughter going about with a pauper. But that proud young woman had evidently lost her heart to the disheveled, romantic artist, to his thin, El Greco–like face, to his bony, paint-stained hands and the way he looked when he walked, hunched and thin, yet boyish. Her wealthy merchant family had unwittingly reproduced the dynamic seen over and over throughout history: when the farmer grows rich, he gives his children a middle-class education and exposes them to culture, and as a result they reject his material obsessions and turn to higher things. It took months of quarreling with her parents before she won their consent to the marriage. She had threatened to take off, enter a convent, run away to God knows where; she had shut herself in her room, made their lives miserable, and secretly thought, I want him, my blue-eyed church painter, I want him, and I shall have him. Even for a devout potato merchant, the thought of his beautiful daughter vanishing into a nunnery was too much to bear. So her parents finally gave in; the proud, well-bred Céline got her penniless painter.

  He came with all sorts of strings attached: a life of poverty, money troubles, Franciscus’s poor health, his nightly coughing fits and asthma attacks, the damp in their run-down house, the cramped rooms where they passed their days, the hunger and endless bawling and sniveling of five urchins in a row. And she doted on her husband as if he were her sixth child. “Oh, my dear sweet painter,” she would say to him, shaking her head, when she wanted to poke gentle fun at him. And he adored her—the knot in her lustrous hair, her throat, her straight shoulders, the gracefully curving joints of her wrists, the perfect shape of her fingernails, the strange pale glow she gave off when she spoke.

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  The proud Céline’s new life was filled with toil and painful sacrifices to make ends meet. She was always dressed in black; like her husband and children, she wore ordinary clogs, because the tall, stylish boots she had worn in her parents’ home stood out beside the rest of her family and the other residents of the alley. So she buried them deep in the old cupboard and tottered around on hollowed-out blocks of wood like everyone else. To contribute to the family budget, she took all sorts of odd jobs. For a while, she mended clothes for the better families, until her old treadle sewing machine broke down and she couldn’t afford a new one. She composed letters for her illiterate neighbors when they had to reply to official correspondence, write to a family member, or request legal assistance—in those days, such letters had to be written in French, never in Dutch. When her husband was ill at home for weeks on end, she did charity work with the nuns from the convent to stay in their good books so that he wouldn’t lose his job; she raised her five children as properly and decently as she could.

  My grandfather, who was second in line, was soon followed by two little brothers and a sister. For a while, Céline cleaned the house of a French-speaking family in the center of town, and the little money she earned seemed to slip through her fingers like water. At the same time, their house was becoming overcrowded, but they weren’t able to start looking for a larger one till spring, when her husband regained some of his strength, and of course their new home, once they found it, was in worse repair, since they could not afford to pay any more rent. For some time, Franciscus worked in a monastery for the Brothers of Charity, who uncharitably paid him starvation wages to repaint their entire refectory. Even so, the family remained devout and strictly loyal to the Church. The priest paid regular visits, listened to Céline’s tales of drudgery and domestic crisis, and sent a few students a couple of days later with scraps from his well-spread table.

  Franciscus fixed up the damp old house as best he could, replacing crumbling putty and broken door frames, reinforcing moldering beams, and repairing the rotten steps of the cellar staircase. Their new neighborhood, around Oostakkerstraat in Sint-Amandsberg, was more to their liking; in the summer they could see a few fields over the low garden wall, and a little farther away there were wild flowers in bloom along a canal. They could put a goat out to pasture there, so that the children could at least drink milk regularly and they could make their own fresh cheese. In the evening, in his narrow bed in the packed children’s room upstairs, my grandfather could hear his parents talking in the old kitchen, his father’s low rumble alternating with his mother’s soft replies, the call and response of a large bluebottle and a turtle dove, lulling him peacefully to sleep. It was a marriage, he wrote, based on “deep and genuine love, and when my mother stroked her coughing husband’s thin cheeks, she would sometimes call him ‘my down-and-out darling,’ and her light gray eyes would grow moist.”

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  Their son Urbain Martien, named after Céline’s grandfather, was the kind of lad who stole everybody’s heart. He was solidly built, with long, curly hair, sturdy hands, and guileless blue eyes. Waddling after his statuesque mother like a duckling, entertaining her with his whimsical ways and irrepressible urges to cuddle and play the fool, he would dance in his clogs or walk around the washhouse with his tin cup, secretly drinking the soapy water in which his own dirty underwear was soaking. During Sunday car trips six decades later, still happy as a child in his old age, he could stare at the perfection of a Boeing gliding through the air high overhead and say it was all so beautiful, everything he saw in the world. His joie de vivre had sprouted in the darkest soil—he says plenty about that in his memoirs. Urbain Martien, predestined for everything and for nothing (because he had many indefinable talents, his mother once said, laughing). Urbain was a hardy survivor, but sensitive and sentimental. Standing in the sun on an Easter Sunday morning at the age of seventy, he could blurt out with tears in his eyes that the blue of the flowering irises in the backyard was so unfathomably deep around their bright yellow hearts that it gave him palpitations—something like that—and it was a shame a person had to die without ever understanding how such things came to be.

  When it was explained to him as a seven-year-old in catechism classes that you simply could not see God—not even on a cloudless day—because God was invisible, and on top of that, even on clear nights you couldn’t look past the stars to the place where He reportedly dwelled, and accordingly, faith could not be verified, because then it would no longer be faith, he broke in: “Yes, but, Reverend Father, then you might just as well say that there are millions of sea horses floating around in Heaven, since nobody can see it anyway.” The astonished priest’s jaw dropped open as if the hinge had snapped. Those sea horses, drifting through dark and infinite space, between the stars, sometimes light-years apart, have never left my imagination, and they still come floating by, numberless hosts of them in sublime silence, whenever I hear talk of proving God’s existence. Yet Urbain Martien was a man of faith, and more than that; after returning from the Great War, he began to show signs of religious mania. He got up at five thirty twice a week to attend the early mass, shuffled through ice and snow to church in his spotlessly polished boots on days when even the priest could not be bothered, sat in the cool silence of the parish church in summer as the rosary beads slipped through his fingers and his lips moved slightly, murmuring Latin prayers. He lit candles for Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows and went to confession once a week with bowed head, he who seemed too pure of heart for the mildest of venial sins.

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  The world he grew up in before 1900 was full of smells that now have largely disappeared. A tannery gave off its tenacious stench in the thin September mist; the tenders with their loads of raw coal pulled in and out of the station in the dark winter months; th
e odor of horse droppings in the streets in the early-morning hours could create the illusion, for the half-slumbering boy by the drafty window, that he was in the countryside somewhere, as could the smell of hay, herbs, and grass that still pervaded the city. The penetrating odor of old wood and damp sackcloth prevailed in the dimly lit shops where salt, sugar, flour, and beans were still sold en vrac, in bulk, scooped into sacks and canisters brought by the women who shopped there. The closed courtyards smelled of Brussels sprout trimmings, horse manure scraped off the streets, and drying tobacco leaves. Describing his own grandmother, born in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, he said that her black apron—he called it a pinafore—smelled like the offal of young rabbits.

  As a white-haired elder surrounded by an admiring circle of my aunties and cousins, he could spend hours lost in the particulars of that life in the last decade of the nineteenth century, his childhood years wrapped in the sulfurous fumes of early factories, the memory of the street hawkers’ cries, the slam of the thin wooden door of the public toilet at the end of the alley beside an ivy-covered wall that smelled of urine and nettles. The everyday dreariness of the first wave of industrialization had thoroughly shaped the contours of his thinking, although he also began early in life, after leafing through the few books his father owned, to dream of the color palette of Tintoretto and Van Dyck.

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  It’s the spring of 2012. I’ve been to London with my son for a few days, not only to show him the original model for his beloved city of New York, but also in the interest of male bonding: the connection a father must renew every now and then with his fifteen-year-old son to overcome all the discord of an upbringing. I don’t want to club him to death with culture, so we stroll through Covent Garden, have a bite at Carluccio’s, drink pints of bitter in a wood-paneled pub, and hash out our differences in an amicable tone, later roaming along the South Bank at night, hopping from one Tube line to the other, and enjoying ourselves immensely.

  Still, the next day I want to show him a museum or two, carefully dosed so as not to alienate him, because I know that despite the distrust of everything highbrow inspired by his ever-flickering iPhone, he is susceptible to painting. He was only eight when he squatted in front of the portrait of a young sixteenth-century man in Venice and said, Papa, come sit with me, this is so beautiful. So as we stroll through the airy rooms of the National Gallery, I have no desire to force anything on him, although I do make sure that, as if by chance, we end up in front of the spectacular anamorphosis in Holbein’s Ambassadors. I explain to him how you can see a perfectly proportioned skull with the aid of a conical mirror, but he wonders why the painter decided to distort the image. Maybe because you can never look death straight in the eyes, I say, but he seems only moderately convinced. Then I show him The Four Elements, those famous market scenes by the Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer, once the pride of Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts, and explain that despite the religious subjects in the background—which are so small they hardly seem relevant anyway—the barely concealed erotic scenes are the real point. I draw his attention to the tell-tale symbols used in those days, the variations, the positions, and the suggestions. Now his attention takes on a pensive quality: has his father become such a hopeless intellectual that he sees pimps in vendors, whores in fishmongers, phalluses in leeks and fish, and vaginas in jars of butter and half-open pea pods? We continue our stroll, and suddenly there it is, and because I am totally unprepared, it lands a frontal blow to my consciousness.

  There she hangs, flagrantly nude and inviolable: Velázquez’s Venus at Her Mirror, known as the Rokeby Venus. The painting is slightly larger than my grandfather’s copy—that is, if I recall correctly; I saw his version only for an instant, somewhere in that small room of his. Venus’s hair is also lighter in shade than in his copy—I don’t know why my grandfather, meticulous copyist that he was, painted her hair almost black. I am catapulted back in time—to the day in my childhood when I hopped up the three steps to his room and found him crying silently with a reproduction of this painting in his hands. I remain standing in front of the masterpiece for a long time, under the spell of memory. My son stands some distance away, fiddling with his iPhone, and asks, “Are you done yet? It’s kind of embarrassing to see an old man standing and staring at a naked woman like that.” Realizing that my true motives are a bit too complicated to explain, I nod and tear myself away from the painting I yearn to investigate in more detail, glancing over my shoulder as we leave the room. I’ll have to go to my father’s house and have another look at the copy when I get home. I remember what he always used to tell me: your grandfather saw his own wife naked only once, by accident. She was washing herself on a Saturday afternoon and he came home earlier than anticipated—she never washed without sending him out of the house first. And she called him every name in the book that day, wept and wailed and later complained to his mother about his shamelessness, demanding that he apologize at length (his mother was probably wise enough not to take sides). The nudity of Velázquez’s Venus, so warm and natural, so unabashed, perfectly at ease with herself, with her idle, aristocratic figure—such a thing could be found in painting alone, solely and singly in the consolation of art. Never have I understood the depths of that bitter consolation more fully than there, on that spring day in the National Gallery, and since I’ve started thinking about how the details of a copy can add something to the original painting, I have come to suspect that other secrets lie veiled behind what I once saw merely as clumsy copies. Again, I see his tear-streaked face before me, so long ago. The sun breaks through the clouds over Trafalgar Square and makes the fountains sparkle, a spreading prism of hues that emerge and vanish: madder, white lead, and a sheen of cobalt, am I right? I wish I could check with my grandfather. Nelson stands high and unassailable, a dark angel on his sun-ringed pedestal; on the stairs of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a young woman is playing a Bach partita. St. Martin, I’ll be damned, I say to my son, this church is dedicated to my grandfather’s patron saint, you know Martien was his family name. You just figured that out now? he asks, his eyes locked on the b-boys breakdancing on the sidewalk in front of the National Gallery. And suddenly it pains me to think that they will never meet, my line of descent and my descendant. I look at my son, suppress the urge to lay my hand on his shoulder, and ask, Where shall we go tonight?

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  As the Eurostar comfortably whisks us back to Brussels, deep below sea level, and I’m telling my son how long the journey used to take when I was young—the night ferry from Ostend to Dover, bobbing on the waves with its engines slowly pounding—a different story flashes into my mind: my grandfather’s disastrous wartime crossing in 1915. He had been wounded on the Yser front for the second time and carried off with a bullet wound in his thigh, just below the groin, and was sent to the coastal village of Dinard in northern France to recover. He decided to cross from nearby Saint-Malo to Southampton, with several other convalescent soldiers, to visit his brother-in-law in Swansea, but a violent storm struck almost as soon as they reached the open sea, and raged on for a day and a half. He arrived in England broken and drained and later referred to it as one of the greatest ordeals he had endured in the war. I have my own vivid memories of the night ferry, the slurred shouts of the drunkards on deck, the hard benches where we lay rocking for much of the night, the chalk cliffs illuminated by the morning sun, the relief that the night had passed without a storm. The voyage to England was still laden with symbolic meaning in those days; when you arrived in London after a half day and full night at sea, everything looked more exotic. I recall a sunny room in Kensington Gardens where I once stayed. I read poems by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats there. My son listens to these stories, which must sound nostalgic to him, sits in silent thought for a moment, and then says, “Funny, I used to imagine the Channel Tunnel was made of glass and you could see the sea horses swimming above your head, and now I don’t even feel like we’re crossing
the sea at all.”

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  My grandfather so often told me how his passion for painting was born. But only after reading his memoirs did I understand how palpably that love was etched into his soul in childhood. He describes in detail how his father—seated on a wooden stool, with his paintbrush and a cotton swab on a wooden handle in his right hand, his palette with its carefully applied dots of paint on a small stand next to him, one eye half shut, back bent—retouches the fingernails of the Angel of the Annunciation in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. Then he goes on to restore the color of a faded leaf on a clumsily painted date tree in the sixth Station of the Cross. He leans back for a moment to evaluate the result, half turns toward his son, and asks for a finer brush to fix a contour. He mixes most of his paint himself, since he cannot afford to buy it readymade in tubes. In the open pear-wood box are clumps of pigment, toxic cobalt powder, and sweet-smelling sienna, sepia, and sinopia; flasks of refined linseed oil, turpentine, methylated spirits, and siccative; thin knives and palettes; old brushes made of rare squirrel hair; round brushes, flat hog-bristle brushes, and a pair of soft hair brushes made from sable marten, for which he had scrimped and saved for months; cloths of diverse fabrics, from coarse to fine; pencils, charcoal, and asphaltum—the appurtenances of the endless, silent hours that Urbain spends with his father. He sits obediently in a church pew all afternoon, watching Papa’s hands in motion. Sometimes his father stands at the top of a ladder and performs death-defying feats: removing the candle soot from the cloud on which the Virgin Mother stands in a tricky corner above a side altar; accentuating the plague sore on St. Roch’s thigh with a swipe of brownish-red, adding a new set of eyelets to St. Crispin’s old-fashioned shoes, sprucing up St. Eloy’s flaking emerald-green jacket, and brightening the three lilies in the desert sands by St. Giles’s feet with a thin layer of deadly poisonous white lead.