War and Turpentine Read online

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  If those afternoons in church were his childhood heaven, the hell was soon to follow. After a few failed attempts to find an apprenticeship, he goes to work for his uncle Evarist, a “smith/iron-turner/mechanic.” At first he is put in charge of greasing the lathes and drilling machines and hauling the iron: round and square bars of iron, heavy pieces of cast iron, sections of angle irons, and sheets of iron he can hardly move. After a month he is permitted to do jobs outside the workshop with his boss or another assistant. After a year and a half, he earns fifty centimes a day.

  He witnesses a grisly accident at work: his cousin, the smith’s son, comes to work blind drunk and falls facedown into the blazing furnace. He sees how the smith—who was oblivious at first, hammering with his back to the furnace—roars profanities as he pulls his son out of the flames, but it is too late. They take in the sight of a ruined face, a charred lump with vaguely human features expelling a slimy fluid mixed with saliva and blood. The eyes are burnt white like the eyes of a fried fish; the mouth is a black hole in which the exposed upper row of teeth glimmers. An assistant brings a bucket of water and pours it over the dying boy’s head. With an excruciating gurgle and hiss, the water soaks deep into the burnt flesh, and he chokes out his last breath, his body writhing and twitching. A dark stain forms in the crotch of his work trousers. The father throws himself on his son, snatches up the unrecognizable head, grips the body by the shoulders, and says nothing, but sits motionless, minute after minute, mumbling an endless stream of nearly inaudible curses under his breath. He does not look up at anyone, as if trying to bore his gaze into those white eyeballs. The workers and apprentices stand and stare.

  “Piss off, every one of you, before I kill you too,” he snarls, without looking up. One by one, they drift outside, where a low sun shines over the rain-swept sheds and stables.

  It is the first time my grandfather has seen a dead man. There was no psychological counseling in those days; he goes home and says nothing all evening.

  In the days that follow, he returns to the smithy each day and finds a locked door. He dares not ask when his cousin will be buried. He hears about the burial a few days later, when he runs into another worker near the city gate in the morning twilight: “They chucked him in a damn pit, same as an animal, somewhere out back of their property. The reverend went to see, but the smith took him by the throat.” The smithy stays closed for over a month, and the orders pile up. When it finally reopens, only two workers show up, and one apprentice: Urbain. The men work listlessly, the place is a shambles, more and more orders are canceled, the smithy is often deserted, and the lathes go untouched. The last journeyman tenders his resignation, and Urbain leaves a few days later. The smith doesn’t even look up from his workbench as the boy stammers his apologies with hunched shoulders and stumbles outside, lurching as if he has soiled his trousers.

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  Then time moves fast. After another few weeks of searching, he ends up in the iron foundry. Heavy labor. A boy of barely thirteen, he spends the first few days wandering disoriented through the deafening racket, among the men carrying heavy hunks of iron, in the burning heat of the furnaces, amid the yelling and shouting, the crude jokes, and the poisonous vapors that fill his lungs. Some of the men have a pale gloss over their eyes from working in the glow of the hot metal. Others have what resemble club feet from stepping in molten iron by the furnace. They are like mild-mannered demons roaming their underworld, tough and long-suffering, dogged and withdrawn. Young boys like Urbain aren’t allowed to drag the heavy baskets of scrap metal along the narrow gangways; instead, he is put to work at the furnace’s mouth, balancing the large wooden basin with all his strength as it fills with the molten iron spilling out of the clay troughs. The men gather round with their long wooden ladles, which they hold up to the basin; my grandfather’s job is to carefully tip the heavy crucible, so that each man carries just the right portion of iron back to the dies. The heat cuts off his breath; it’s as if his eyes are melting in their sockets. When the gush of iron subsides to a trickle, the conduit is plugged with a pointed mass of clay on a lance. The fire crackles and hisses and seethes at the edges of the stoke hole. Sometimes the plug flies out, like a devil spitting wide spirals of fire, fans of sparks, molten metal that winds a loopy path over the pounded earth floor, a volcanic eruption in miniature. Then the men hurl large scoops of wet clay with all their might, so that the fire will not spread throughout the building. One day it happens: the plug falls out of the worn-out stoke hole, there is not enough damp clay in the bucket, and the men shout at Urbain to shift the basin back in place and keep it upright until they return with clay from the courtyard. The river of fire is soon spurting over the edge of the crucible, which he tries to hold steady with all his strength. They call out that he must not let it tip, he feels the heat swallow him up, he is blinded, burned alive, his head goes hazy—and then, after some sort of rush of wind inside his ears, there is a deafening silence. The fiery river spills over the rim of the basin; his hands seem to have disappeared. The molten iron winds its way around his clogs, he feels them cracking under the searing pressure—he thinks of club feet, he cannot move, behind him is frenzied motion he no longer notices, the heat enfolds him like a mother, cradling him, numbing him, the yelling and shouting ebbs away again. Dark patches appear in the vast, divine light that beckons him, great shovelfuls of earth all around him and into the blazing stoke hole, and then a plug on a lance after all, the return of something like consciousness, hissing and bubbling, a nauseous feeling, large hands reaching out to him and voices calling, Come here, lad, quick. But he stays stock-still, his head spinning; the handkerchief sticking out of his trouser pocket has caught fire and is burning like a faint blue flower beside him. He sees the upturned eyes of a saint his father painted in an old fresco in a silent Sunday church; he wants to keep sitting here forever. Then someone comes running across the strip of earth, tugs at his shoulders, grabs him by the armpits, and pulls. His clogs are clenched and trapped in the cooling iron; a man with a crowbar starts breaking them off his feet. It all feels like part of a dream, and when he is finally lifted out of the broken clogs and carried off, he retches up what little he has eaten that day. He is laid in the courtyard in the lukewarm drizzle, where he slowly returns to his senses and watches the gray clouds drift by.

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  At that moment, something in me changed, he writes.

  I imagine his mother noticing the change that very evening. He walks differently; there is something about his newly muscular neck, his hunched shoulders. He is short and burly, and says little since he started working in the foundry. The first pits and scars have already formed on his back, left by sparks that leap onto the workers when the flames rise high. That evening, his mother sees the introverted glimmer in his eyes as he sits at the supper table staring into space, not hearing a word the other children say. He’s not hungry, he tells her; he goes out into the courtyard, where over the low wall he sees a few nuns go mumbling by in their fluttering black habits, strange birds from another world. The back door creaks, his father comes to his side; he has lost a lot of weight in recent weeks, and his fragile form contrasts with the sturdy young man around whose shoulder he silently puts his arm.

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  I see in the paper that a young Ghent politician has a new master plan for the city. He says that the overpass built in the 1960s, which penetrated deep into the city center and reduced the once-proud Zuidpark to half its size, should be demolished and replaced with a tunnel. Then the park—originally conceived in a traditional nineteenth-century style but later sapped of its soul by the expressway—can become Ghent’s own Central Park, the proud herald of a new, ecological age. This highway exit was controversial from the start; critics saw it as proof that the proud provincial capital had traded in its pride for filthy lucre. Luxury apartments had popped up along Frère Orbanlaan and Gustaaf Callierlaan, the graceful avenues by the park, but ever since the 1960s those apart
ments have looked out over the expressway. A bust of the great Flemish poet Karel van de Woestijne used to stand in a modest flower bed, looking somewhat lost; a short distance away, in the surviving half of the park, is an equestrian statue of King Albert I; and at the end of the park—where a splendid railway station, Zuidstatie, once stood—a fountain spurts behind a modern building. I recall the color of the begonias in spring before that building was there. A great deal of history has vanished around this city park—in particular, the nineteenth-century zoological garden and the graceful old station. The zoo with its ponds and flower beds, its cafeteria in the Byzantine style, disappeared when my grandfather was fourteen. In Muinkmeersen field, where it had stood, came working-class dwellings clustered around little courtyards. The only vestige of the animal park is cozy little Muinkpark, with its arched bridge and artificial boulders, in a once-residential neighborhood shaken up in the past decade by the arrival of a megaplex cinema. I imagine my grandfather and a neighbor boy walking through it—the carrion smell from the predators’ cages, the performing elephants weary of their tricks, and the happy faces of the bourgeois visitors, under the spell of an exoticism untainted by our modern pangs of conscience.

  Zuidstatie, at the far end of the park, was the pride of the early-twentieth-century city, a palatial railway station with a large front square where the bronze statue of a gladiator stood beside a fountain ringed with flowers. My grandfather spent his free Sunday afternoons there—Saturday was a working day, the last of the six long days in the working week—strolling around with his friend, sliding down the bluestone parapets, watching the arriving and departing trains from a platform above the tracks, taking pleasure in being sprinkled by the clouds of soot and ash that spewed fitfully out of the broad smokestacks of the locomotives. The interior of Zuidstatie was a sensational sight: a spacious concourse with a steel framework, a sloped roof with large windows in the style of the day, and an impressive indoor garden of palm trees, azaleas, and all sorts of ornamental shrubs filling the middle of the space beneath the glass dome. The front square was bright and open too, radiating self-confidence. The station was demolished in 1930. When I emerge from the underground parking lot now, I face the modern city library on one side and a shopping center on the other, where the chic Parkhotel once stood opposite the station. Younger generations do not even feel the loss; normality is a by-product of forgetting. I try to imagine what it was like here a century ago: a row of carriages, the horses patiently waiting with nosebags of oats, the coachmen—mustached, of course—drinking beer out of earthenware tankards in the café, the smell of horse manure everywhere, passengers going in and out under the stately pediment of the facade, possibly a barrel organ, and, on the gladiator’s bronze head, a pigeon. No one even remotely suspects what will happen barely ten years later.

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  Walking uphill from Zuidpark, you arrive in Sint-Pietersplein, a large square where, back then, the latest novelties were regularly on show. On a Sunday afternoon, a couple of five-cent pieces would buy you a ride in the wicker basket of a large hot-air balloon that rose into the air along a set of cables, hovered for a while so that you could see the medieval roofs of the old city in the distance, and came back down again. Newfangled tomfoolery, the older generation said, pride goeth before a fall, but it thrilled the boys and the soldiers with upswept mustaches. My grandfather proudly reports that he shook the hand of the Belgian aviator Daniel Kinet there one day, as the balloon was buffeted by a gust of wind. Kinet, already famous then, was a backer of the project; he would turn up again later at unexpected moments.

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  While Zuidpark was based on traditional geometrical shapes, Citadelpark was inspired by the Romantic philosophy of the natural-looking landscape, much as the old zoo had been. Ghent sensed that it was shaped by the historical forces of rationalist planning on the one hand and picturesque romanticism on the other, and expressed that fact in its recreational areas. The neoclassical citadel vanished long ago, making way for the park named after it; all that remains is the Roman-style gateway. In fact, this so-called citadel had been little more than an old barracks, fallen into decay; few traces of the foundations can still be found—but the cement-lined romantic grottos behind the waterfall are still there, and I can imagine my grandfather strolling here as a young man, in his clogs, with his head of coarse, straight hair, his hands in his pockets. Over the waters of the pond, where the ducks are cackling, he and his companion skip flat stones.

  I have my own memories of passing under the Latin motto on that gateway—Nemo me impune lacessit, “No one provokes me and goes unpunished”—on my way to the museum on Sunday afternoons, hand in hand with my almost seventy-year-old grandfather, to learn about the paintings he admired: most of all, perhaps, the large, luminous winter scene The Skaters, painted by Emile Claus in the year 1891, an image in light yellow and white of a pond frozen solid in the powdery snow, where three boys in clogs are preparing to ride their simple wooden sleds. Their clothing is thick and gray; there is a snowman by the edge of the pond; in the distance floats a line of pollard willows, and a farmhouse lies sunk in the landscape. The freezing-cold silence roars from the paint, a feast of light and clarity; he passed down his deep delight in these things to me. Only later did I realize he had shown me a painting from the year he was born—and wasn’t he born in February, sometime in the frosty winter months when Claus painted this scene? I request the record of the weather on that date from the Royal Meteorological Institute in Ukkel and discover it was a day of chilly mist, just below freezing; I imagine the wisps of fog at the confluence of the Lys and Scheldt Rivers, his mother in childbirth, the smell of the stove, which isn’t drawing well on that low-pressure day, the newborn swaddled in wool and laid down by the midwife in the primitive cradle next to the stove, and Claus the painter at work on his evocative, eggshell-white painting of a frozen pond nearby, on which a few boys are skating, lads my grandfather may have run into as a child, when they were young men.

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  In front of me, on my writing desk, lies a heavy gray rock with an unusual shape. It’s long and thin: almost seven inches long, three inches wide, and an inch and a half thick. Its rounded corners are perfectly symmetrical; the top and bottom are absolutely smooth; millennia of aimless tumbling in the breaking waves have shaped this stone into an ideal thing, as if human hands had fashioned it; it’s hard to imagine a more tangible illustration of the chance origins of natural perfection. My grandfather painted a folkloric scene on its flat top after returning from his trip to Italy: a man and woman in dark clothes against a background of looming hills, the sea, and a childish sailboat. In slightly shaky black capitals above it, with a thin brush, he wrote “Rapallo.”

  He gave it to me at a time when I was collecting rocks—I must have been about twelve years old. The scene on the stone was not of immediate interest to me; what mattered was the simple fact that my grandfather had painted something on it, including a word I did not understand—for I quickly forgot he had told me it was the name of a city in northern Italy.

  A decade and a half after his death, at a time when I was trying to read the poet Ezra Pound’s unfathomable Cantos, my wife and I visited the town of Rapallo on our way to Florence. We walked on the small, stony beach near the old tower and there I found, to my surprise—how often you are blind to your personal history—rocks of the same shape and size. So he had simply picked it up right there.

  There are moments in life when everything inside you starts to shift; I remember my arm around the shoulder of my lovely young wife, the feeling of weightlessness and freedom; the sun, the wind, the smell of salt and seaweed; the sudden feeling that I was almost physically inhabiting my grandfather’s body, in a place where he had stood beside his faithful, timid wife Gabrielle in her black mantilla. They were on their way to Rome; it was one of those pilgrimage tours arranged by some Catholic organization, and Rapallo was merely a quick stop along the way, where they
probably just had time for lunch and a short walk. He must have picked up the stone while they were combing the stony beach, all dressed in black, and Gabrielle must have said, “What are you doing, Urbain? That’s much too heavy to put in your suitcase.” And he, stubborn in these little things, kept it in his hand, boarded the bus with it—it must have been sometime in the mid-1950s—and lugged the three-pound stone all the way back home, where he later decorated it with this souvenir-shop scene, as the talisman of a journey of which few photographs have survived. Oddly enough, when he painted the stone he felt no desire to depict a particular experience of his own, but instead painted a sentimental, folkloristic cliché, which apparently encapsulated the happiness of that moment for him. Of course, it’s always possible that he really did witness such a scene; who knows, maybe there were people walking around in traditional costume that day, perhaps it was a holiday, there’s no way of knowing.

  That trip to Rome was the only time in his long life that he went abroad, except for his journeys to England and France to convalesce during the First World War and a trip to Oslo that I know frustratingly little about—only that he often claimed people there spoke a dialect that sounded like the crudest Ghent patois, but was nonetheless impossible for him to understand. I once checked this while conversing with the writer Jostein Gaarder, and it turns out my grandfather was right. In any case, the rock from Rapallo with the painted scene is my only keepsake from his travels, and of course, rocks tell no tales. Because his memoirs end in 1919, two-thirds of his life is buried in stony silence.

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  Rapallo is provincial, but open to the sea. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was wandering the beach there when he came up with the idea of writing a heroic epic not about Empedocles (whom he apparently read about in the poems of Friedrich Hölderlin), but about Zarathustra. The poet Ezra Pound, scarred by the First World War like my grandfather, went to live there in 1924, in a period when his mistress, the American violinist Olga Rudge, became pregnant and after giving birth sent the child away to live with a wet nurse, a German-speaking peasant. Pound roamed about restlessly, kept returning to Rapallo, worked on his Cantos there while railing against Jewish usury on Italian radio, and became a follower of Mussolini. Through Olga’s offices, he even met Il Duce in person and tried to sell his ideas about the evils of Jewish finance to the Fascist dictator, who is said to have waved him off, calling the Cantos divertente, entertaining—an anecdote that Pound, showing a sense of irony, later incorporated into one of his Cantos. Yeats wrote about astrology in Rapallo, Kokoschka painted an almost Impressionist view of the bay, and Joyce once came for a visit; Elmore Leonard set his thriller Pronto there.