It should be a warm, pulsating monument for him and his motherly mistresses, and all those they represent: a memorial that honours the ecstasy and the slightly laughable banality of our copulations; and anyone who threatens to find this suggestion obscene should ask himself which one he chooses of the two reactions to which that stupid war led, for which the bed and the war cemetery can happily serve as symbols. When that deluge of ammunition and mud and rubble finally ebbed, it left shipwrecked people behind for whom the world had collapsed and who had understood the message: that it’s better to seek salvation by crawling away from history, either in calm happiness, or in the wombs of the masses, the sweet anaesthesia of the collective. That is the land I saw being revealed after the blood and destruction, and fortunately this time God was wise enough not to stretch a rainbow over the new earth.
Obscene is the word that I reserve for the view of a market square where, after the bang of the fatal impact has died way and the worst of the groaning has fallen silent, the sparrows are copulating again on the shoulders of the statue, and in its fixed place in the sun, on the window sill of a bourgeois house, above the smudges of blood on the pavement, the cat licks its coat clean as if nothing has happened. Obscene the rows of soldiers’ helmets that I see on a dyke in the first few months after peace breaks out. My husband helps me through the omnipresent mud. He warns me to put my feet where he has first put his and not to deviate from the slippery path of planks, under which I can hear the sodden earth sighing at each step. He carries his camera on his shoulders and looks to see where he can place the tripod. The water that flows past under the dyke has the same grey vocabulary as the landscape through which it is seeking a path: ochre-coloured, dull green, dull brown under a cloudless, obscenely brilliant sky — it doesn’t seem like water, but like gastric juices, fermenting under the lead weight of the sky in earth shot bare. Nowhere does a roof line or row of trees disturb or punctuate the horizon. Everything that could delight me about that countryside has gone: the long, long processions of poplars, the trunks and tops bending obliquely with the wind like a procession of the blind leading the blind, and the shy villages that huddle around the church towers like piglets searching for their mothers’ nipples.
The helmets lie in rows on the slope of a dyke; I don’t even know if they are Belgian helmets or German. I think that we are near Diksmuide, the place from where the salvoes boomed through the coastal plain the day I met my husband, under iron angels’ wings and the clattering and my hysterical laughter. The fronts were right next to each other, divided only by the river, at most about thirty metres. I point out the helmets. They remind me of turtles that have crawled ashore to dig a hole in that earth that you can’t really call formless, rather disgustingly pregnant with every conceivable form, and lay their eggs — as if, as if I definitely say, the earth, monstrous placenta, is kneading new life forms, unimaginable hybrid creatures from the mud and the bodies it has sucked in, to populate its bare, obscenely bare surface. Perhaps he can photograph them, because I still believe that you can’t suggest anything better in pictures than in a picture from which the main thing is missing — but what is the main thing? He has to photograph the war, but how can you capture the nervation in an upheaval that not only travels through the ground, but through millions who have been left without sons, fathers, brothers, fiancés and husbands?
Years later, years and years later, in the time when my husband and I were the only ones to return each summer, we are looking out over one of the meadows on the slopes of the observation mounds near the border. The earth has healed, is green again, planted with young trees, cattle are grazing again, but a local farmer says that the earth is still full. “If all who are lying were to stand up, it would move, the ground,” he says, “like a bedspread on a bed full of playing children.”
During the annual trips that I take after my husband’s death, to that same house, long since sold and standing empty, I dig for something like regret or pity deep down in myself. But all I find in my cavities is a vague kind of resentment, an ore that cannot be transformed into another mineral, innocent sadness, melancholy if you will, which I can use, and make my child pay for my inability. With an emphasis she cannot escape from, I ask her again and again if she will take me there. Since her father’s death I can no longer bring myself to drive.
We seldom speak while we are en route. She holds the steering wheel in her hands, stiffly upright, the kind of driver that can never relax, and I sit next to her, map on my lap, although we both know we’re going to get lost. It might be the familiar ritual that colours intimate friendships, constantly supposedly not knowing the way and then the other person says: I recognize that junction, that chapel before those two lime trees, we must go left here according to me. But we remain tight-lipped and I never look at the map.
As soon as we approach the border area I rely on the silhouette of the hills. At their feet the roads dawdle, fork and become increasingly narrow, capillaries in the landscape, as if to smuggle us unseen to the other side. No cloud of dust betrays our route.
Sometimes a guffaw escapes me, equally dismayed and sarcastic, and I see that my child is too stubborn to ask what there is to laugh about. I can see it from the desperate grip of her hands on the steering wheel. I can feel it by the brusqueness with which she accelerates or decelerates or changes gear, and I think: here we are then, a mother and her daughter, the only fruit of my loins that I have ever pushed out of my pelvis, while the grinding, millstone silence of fathers and sons crushes us to dust — two women side by side, two pictograms of resentment.
The map on my lap is no more than a fig leaf, the cloth in which we break our bitter bread. I want to get lost and my daughter knows it. She brakes too abruptly and takes the bends too fast, to make me sick, but I don’t turn a hair. Every relationship composes its own soundtrack. If the drumming of hail is ours, so be it.
I wait and say nothing because I know that she’ll get fed up with it sooner or later, and will park the car somewhere in the greenery, get out, put her transistor on the bonnet, spread the blanket on the grass, unload the picnic hamper and position herself with a book in her folding chair, as if she is actually enjoying the excursion. I will sit down on the blanket, take a generous helping of cold chicken and, to spice up her horror a little more, prattle about the soil on which her strapped heels are reluctantly resting: my beloved land, dredged up from sea water and crumbling away, as my father always told us, keeps sinking back into the waves, and is pushed up again, like a laundry maid dips the linen into the suds, and pulls it out again, wrings it out and submerges it again, scores, hundreds of times in the terrifying time that doesn’t remember our own stories even as an itch — and then I think, again and again: everything is one big cemetery. What do you think, my child, is the world incredibly ancient or on the contrary very young? What do you think of yourself when you see those smudges of chalky soil through the topsoil, there and there and there? Of a cadaver like mine, shrinking skin, gradually bared bones? Or is the world finally, finally getting its first teeth again, milk teeth, piercing through smooth gums? Tell me, what do you think? Fold open the map with which you like everyone else designate, invoke, deform or combat the obtuse bedrock of existence. And I still don’t know why I take out my bitterness on her, and where that sour sadness comes from, or why I am so bitter in a time of peace and was so peaceful when I saw the war passing, in the blazing summer, between the wine-red brick houses, the hedges and willows, so close and far away.