War and Turpentine Read online

  High on the converging lines of the ladder, he sees his father’s legs, his ragged trousers, his worn “mules”—old-fashioned slippers—and it’s as if his father has joined the Oriental figures in the background of the frescoes on the wall. He hears the soft sweep of the brushes, which occasionally grows more intense—the eternal blue sky of faith is sometimes large and requires broad strokes. Tinted rays of sunlight descend from the stained-glass windows, casting patches of color on the black marble tiles. He watches dust motes dance in those transparent columns of light. His father asks him for a size-five brush; Urbain digs down into the box, retrieves the brush, carefully climbs halfway up the ladder, and hands it to his father, who leans forward perilously to grasp it. Then Urbain climbs back down and returns to the hard pew, where he sits with his hands between his knees. Franciscus awkwardly straightens his back, clears his throat and wipes his chin on his sleeve, dips the brush into the iron bowl attached to his belt, and adds a few strokes of light yellow to a pale cloud from which the angel of the Annunciation is descending. Silent, endless days. At noon, he and his father share the sandwiches his mother made for them: lard and fatty sausage when they can get it, hard aged goat’s cheese at the end of the month. They chew and swallow, passing a dented flask of water back and forth. The church is locked; no one can walk in on them. This is Urbain’s little heaven. Noises from outside are muted. When the clock strikes the hour, they hear the creak of the swinging beams and the flapping of wings as the birds in the peak of the roof take flight.

  Clattering home on their cheap willow clogs, they sang silly tunes the whole way, like the merry tramps they were. The quaking aspens and white poplars along the ash-covered road rattled their leaves, and the father said to his son that the leaves in the wind were like a crowd of tiny ballerinas. My grandfather looked up in surprise and saw that the trees, which until then had formed one whole, were now fragmented into innumerable unknown forms that were waving at him, a stage with unimaginable scenes. He gulped and felt the warmth of his hand clasped in his father’s.

  —

  He stands in the cemetery sixty years later, his hat under his arm, tears in his eyes, and the rosewood beads of his rosary between his fingers, praying with something like obstinacy for his dead wife Gabrielle Ghys. There is a shrine on the grave in the form of a chapel, with a stained-glass window depicting the Holy Ghost as a white dove. The niche in front of it holds a white marble statue of the Blessed Virgin, spreading her arms wide to receive the wretches and sinners who seek her out. He designed this statue himself and had it carved by a stonemason. He hisses at me to settle down and stop running all over the place. He has just raked the soil in front of the grave into gracefully converging lines, and here I am crashing clumsily through them again. For me, the cemetery is a playground. In the warm June sun, I race past the gladioli and the lilies, the early roses and the beds of violets, beneath the robinia trees and the young ashes; I leap at the spots of light cast through the delicate leaves onto the cinder paths, I give the bronze angel at the start of the row a slap on the back each time I pass, I lie sprawled on the sun-warmed stone of an old grave until my outraged grandfather orders me to get off it at once. Out of nowhere, with a child’s blunt innocence, I ask where his parents’ grave is. He stares at me in disbelief with his piercing old eyes, starts to say something, seems to think better of it, picks a speck of dust off his royal-blue sleeve, and says, “Come on, we’re going home.” Not until half a century later will my father uncover the secret, when to his surprise he finds the old gravestone in the almost perfect hiding place where my grandfather once left it. When I visit the family grave, many years later, there is a thin layer of snow on the ground, and the white figure of Mary shines like opal in the luster of the day.

  My beloved Gabrielle,

  It’s a beautiful June day. I can see the barges passing from where I sit, at the little table that I later painted in wood-grain patterns, you would remember it. I visited your grave this afternoon. There was a very light rain at first, as if the drops were blowing down from the blue sky. Right after that, the bright sun broke through, and the light shining through the stained glass in the back of the small shrine onto your gravestone reminded me of the rays of color in the churches of my childhood. The grandchildren followed the paths, passing the large, bronze angel at the start of the row where you are buried. I watched them go over the hill toward the Campo Santo Cemetery. It means so little to them, they play and chatter and are never quiet. On my way back, I saw a dead marten lying next to a crooked old gravestone, and it was as if all the sorrow I’ve felt since your departure was packed into that stiff, dead creature with dirty streaks of mud on its cold pelt. I thought to myself, they make such fine brushes out of that. I am still the good soldier I always was, Gabrielle, and showed no trace of emotion to Maria and the children.

  At home, I opened the drawers in which it all lies untouched—your prayer book, your linen, the caps you wore to bed. It will remain there, as if in a household shrine. Our marriage was not easy, and you know how I wrestled with the devils deep inside. Our Lord gave us so much, Gabrielle. Less than we’d hoped for, perhaps, but still, more than enough to merit silence.

  —

  The fencing lessons he gave me, between the ages of eight and twelve or thereabouts, took place in the corridor and in the little entrance hall just inside the front door, always from eleven to twelve on Saturdays—we could smell the soup being made in the kitchen. Behind us was the wooden newel post that bore the gleaming, polished case of the large shell from the First World War. On his lathe in the old greenhouse, my grandfather had, with patience and dedication, made two wooden copies of slender foils, with thin handles that he cut from a sheet of metal and beat into a fairly graceful form with a small hammer—a technique he referred to, with restrained pride, as “cold smithing.” We did not wear masks, so he covered the tips of the foils with pieces of cork from wine bottles. Standing before me in his grayish-white smock, he snapped his feet together and ordered me to do the same. “En garde!” he cried. “Straighten your feet! Back straight! Look straight ahead! Raise your foil! Un, deux.” Everything about us was straight, as straight as a poker, just as they had taught him in the military school where he was educated in the picturesque years from 1908 to 1912. Advance, retreat, lunge…ready? Tierce…Pronation!…Sixte en supination! Eh hop-la! Dessous! Reculez! Repos!…En garde! I jumped around like a marionette in a costume drama, taking pains not to rotate my feet outward or inward, keeping my knees carefully bent, but always ready to leap forward or backward, evading his practiced thrusts as I tried to hold my wooden floret in sixte, quarte, octave, and septime—the terms for upper and lower left and right—while making sure to avoid an admonishing tap on the wrist by using the motion of my wrist, instead of my forearm, to guide the foil.

  This went on for an hour; sometimes he would provoke me into attacking and then, instead of parrying, he would neatly dodge the thrust, so that I would charge forward like a young calf, straight into the wooden newel post, where he would deftly catch the shell case before it hit me on the head, saying, “You still have a lot to learn.” I later found one of the foils in the greenhouse, broken, in the large box of soil holding the roots of the nearly centenarian grapevines, on which hardly any grapes grow anymore. He would stand beneath those grapevines on summer mornings, picking a grape when he felt the urge and spitting the skins and seeds out into the soil. And as he spat, he made a noise, a slight coughing noise, which may be one of my deepest childhood memories, because it is surrounded by otherworldly calm. The edges of this image, so to speak, are stained with summer sun, warm earth, the faint odor of carbolic acid and lubricating oil.

  —

  Scenes from his childhood, 1900.

  In his baggy old socks, oversized clogs, and gray smock, with his rumpled, girlish curls and naive blue eyes, he stands dutifully waiting for the nurse to arrive at the small side gate of the convent courtyard with two pans of food for him, one
brimming with soup, the other filled with slices of meat. With vague triumph in his chest, he saunters through the dusk, along the illuminated windows of the shops by the city’s eastern gate, stepping over the railway line by the main dock in the harbor, passing the station where the train comes chugging to life, wending his way through the narrow streets between Land van Waaslaan and Dende​rmond​seste​enweg—Biekorfstraat, Zeemstraat, Wasstraat, toward the béguinage of St. Elisabeth—past a little square with tall poplars that will be chopped down a few years later. Somewhere around there is a small candy store, where he puts down the pans for a moment to catch his breath and to examine the goodies in the poorly lit display.

  There are elderberry balls, boiled candy with paper mottos, Katrien’s caramels, candied anise, liquorice chew sticks and black liquorice laces, sweet-and-sours, and tart strawberry drops, all lined up in large glass jars. A man appears next to him, glances down at the guttersnipe with his smudged face, sees the pans from the convent, and tosses a couple of pennies into the soup. “There, snot-nose, fish those out and you’ll get your candies.” Urbain looks up at the man in astonishment, hesitates for an instant, then rolls up his sleeve and gropes around in the greasy, tepid soup until he feels the coins. He takes them out, puts them in his mouth to lick them clean, pulls his sleeve down over his soup-slicked arm, licks his fingers off, and buys some sweets. He makes his way home, sucking on a sweet, but just before he gets there he twists his ankle on the curb, the soup gurgles out of the fallen pan, and no story in the world can convince his mother that he did not exchange his soup for candy. He sits out his punishment in his musty bedroom, brooding, hungering for his missed supper, staring out through the twilight at the sagging rooftops across the way where a pigeon is mounting its mate.

  —

  Twice a week, a few young men stopped by—recent seminary graduates sent to the working-class neighborhoods by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, an organization for poor relief. They sometimes just came by for a chat, asked how the children were doing in school and whether there were any complaints, and usually brought along something to eat. One day they turned up unexpectedly yet again. Céline was working as a cleaning woman in the neighborhood at the time, for an Italian woman who called her “Donna Cilla,” so Urbain was home alone with his brothers and sisters. They were bored; without their parents around, the afternoons dragged on. They were holding a kind of competition to see who could bite off the most sandwich without swallowing, and my grandfather was on his way to an easy win. He had just taken four huge bites, one after the other, and his cheeks were as round as a beaver’s, when the young men from St. Vincent’s were suddenly in the kitchen, their dark gray overcoats draped over their shoulders like drooping wings. His brothers and sisters fled full-mouthed into the sheltering darkness under the stairs and left him gagging in front of the two-man tribunal. They politely but formally asked him whether his mother was at home, bending their tall, thin forms over his; their smirking faces bobbed in the air above him. The taller of the two bared a row of irregular, yellowed teeth. The large mass of bread congealed into a clump of slimy dough against his palate. His mouth was too full to chew, he knew it would also be impossible to swallow, and spitting was out of the question. His head was spinning. Under the stairs, he heard the coughs and sniffles of his brothers and sisters. A wave of nausea rolled through his body. He had the feeling his eyes were bulging; the two men stared at him with raised eyebrows.

  Well, lad, cat got your tongue?

  He was choking. Tears welled up in his eyes.

  The boy’s not normal, he heard the taller man say.

  A large hand, bony and clumsy, patted his small shoulder. My grandfather had the feeling this hand was not attached to anything, that it was floating out in space somewhere, that it kept getting bigger, and that it was headed for his throat. He shook his head, fought back his tears, walked out into the courtyard, and heaved up the doughy clump, along with the leftover soup he had eaten first. Still hiccupping, he went back inside. The two men were already gone. A rectangular card lay on the kitchen table, stamped in blue ink with the words GOOD FOR 1 LOAF.

  He grabbed the card, stuck it in his smock, and ran out into the street. It was more than a fifteen-minute walk to the bakery where he could pick up the bread. He had forgotten to put on his coat and was shivering. His clogs rattled noisily through the streets. By the time he arrived at the bakery, it was about to close. He rushed inside to the counter and brandished the coupon: “One loaf for my mother, please.”

  The baker’s wife studied the ticket, gave the red-faced, shabbily dressed boy the once-over, and said, I can’t help you. I just have a few loaves left, and they’re for my regular customers.

  Once he was out in the street again, he heard the woman turn the key in the lock behind him. In the distance, a locomotive blew its whistle, somewhere near the city’s eastern gate. The sound seemed dampened by the drizzly air. When he looked up, he saw a flock of wild geese in a V formation, winging majestically over the drab city. The primeval sound of their cries calmed him a little. The V seemed to form an arrow pointing toward the harbor, where a hazy band of brightness had formed over the rooftops and the trees, a slowly opening fissure of low raking light in the cold, descending dusk.

  —

  Only now that I’m reading his memoirs am I gradually forming a picture of his childhood, and as I do, just as many of my own memories are springing to mind, coming to light, gaining significance, meaning, color and odor. For instance: I see him before me now, already an old man, about to go to bed. He has taken off his smock, shirt, and undershirt, and I see, for the first and only time in my life, his bare, white back. From his shoulders to the hollow of his back, his skin is pocked with dark blue pits and scars. He turns around and says sternly, Run along now, little man, away with you. I close the door behind me. The next day I ask where the scars came from. Was it the war?

  The iron foundry, he says curtly, I was thirteen years old when I started working there.

  —

  I read that he could not keep up at school because he was so frequently absent. This was partly because in the morning he was often sent to the apothecary’s shop for the poor, to pick up medicine for his ailing father. He would bring a doctor’s handwritten Latin prescription to the old shop and take his place on the hard bench where there were usually a dozen people already waiting for the apothecary to stick his impressive bald head through the wooden partition and call out, “Who’s first, please?” Then bedlam would break loose, as they all began quarreling about who had arrived first. Some people sprang to their feet and elbowed their way through the crowd. The hatch was slammed shut with a muttered curse. Once the uproar had subsided, the apothecary opened the hatch again and asked if they would please behave like halfway civilized people. Then they shuffled one by one into his office and came out again murmuring under their breath. The boy was usually at the end of the line and did not return home till the late afternoon, bringing stramonium—the poisonous powder of the thorn apple—and niter paper, the dubious medicines prescribed to asthma patients in those days. His father sat by the blazing stove, gasping for air, his hand on the warm bar; my grandfather placed the package wrapped in thin paper next to his father’s hand, where it would remain until the next coughing fit a few moments later.

  —

  Elsewhere, he describes the empty church after school on weekdays, his father atop a small wooden stepladder, retouching St. Peter’s left foot.

  Give me that azure blue again, son, I’m going to touch up that fold in St. Peter’s jacket, and then hand me a little cobalt for that shadow, there, to your right, on the palette. Then his father paints a fresh layer over the flaking white of the lily next to the Virgin Mother, behind the altar. It’s another Annunciation. The young woman with a Flemish profile—a small chin, high pale forehead, thin nose, and serene blue eyes—stands in the glow of a luminous cloud, a sticky, silver mass of mist around her pious face. Next to her is the ang
el with the lily branch, his features masculine and dark; he has a golden band around his waist, a glittering ribbon that swings up over his back and into the sacred cloud. Illegible words are written on this banderole; a few letters can still be made out, old-fashioned Gothic characters meant to keep God’s secret. Sometimes his father needs to mix a little plaster on a board with a raised edge—he stirs it quickly with the worn-down scraper until it’s a creamy mass, a poultice to be applied right away—ideally in one smooth stroke. A few minutes later, he smooths out the surface with a bit of sponge wrapped in a rag, and as it dries he adds the retouch, with brushes, a scrap of cloth, a fingertip or a thumb, moving swiftly from one to the other in wordless concentration. The devotional nature of those hours is sacred to Urbain. When it’s cold, he blows puffs of mist into the beams of light, and they rise like incense during Sunday mass. His faith is fired by the magic of the colors on his father’s old palette, by the privilege of being alone with him there, after the large church gate is locked behind them with the heavy iron key, by the sound of his father humming, there at the top of the stepladder, as if he is part of the scene he is painting, with one foot in heaven already, a heaven of plaster and paint, of old smells, of cold and damp, of filtered light from above shining down on their arms and shoulders, as if they are rising above themselves and into a biblical scene. It is the adoration of painting, a personal allegory, a conspiracy between a father and his son.