The Season of Migration (24 page)

Have you ever seen anything like that, Theo? Have you? Has Father? Has Mother, or Anna, or Lies? Do you think the men of the evangelism committee have seen such things? God sees such things, Theo, God sets them in motion and then lets them live, those moments, those images—they live on inside those of us who see them. What have you seen? What lives in you?

January 13

Dear Theo,

I started a letter to you about the explosion that happened here in the days soon after it happened, but I could not get my words to touch it. I still can't. Now I wish I had told you about it, or more than that, that you could have been with me to see it. If you had been here with me, then you probably would not judge me so harshly, for you would see that my time here has been anything but idle. If I am not the same any longer, it is because of what I have seen. If Father had been here for that, would he have picked up his Bible and run into the destruction to recite verses? Put any of the reverends in a scene like that and watch what they do. If they stand on a cart meant for bodies and raise their voices to the suffering herd, and if that is what you would have had me do, then I think it is best that we no longer speak, for then it is surely you who has changed, and not me.

January 19

Dear Theo,

It wasn't until much later that I learned the fate of Angeline.

I did not think of her. I did not worry. My brain was full but empty. In the hours after the explosion I thought of no one and nothing, only the particular flesh before me, blistered and ragged, and how I could soothe it, how I could tear my clothing into smaller and smaller strips and apply them to that skin. I ran from house to house and gathered olive oil from pantries and hot wax from candles, drenching the last of my clothing in this mixture and applying the linens to scorched and rippling skin.

Skin was divorced from bodies, from personalities and names; my vision was focused on pieces of people, as if these patches of wound were canvases of fine art. I didn't know what I was doing, whom I was tending, the need was so great and so constant. Now when I think of it, I suppose that somewhere inside I assumed Angeline to be all right, to be somewhere among the rest of them, overwhelmed and exhausted and running from place to place. My brain was filled only with the sounds and images. It was as if thought were a sin, in that sea of need, as if to think of anyone in particular would be to ignore all the others, to raise one need above the others, make one body more worthy than another. A few times people tried to give me relief. There was a hand on my shoulder, or Mrs. Denis with a look of concern, saying, “Vincent, slow down, have a rest,” for I had been running nonstop since the explosion, and was that a day ago? Two?

But with every bandage I laid, every hand I held, every brow I wiped with a damp handkerchief, I fought the constant and gnawing presence of the conviction that nothing I was doing was of any use. Some of the miners expected prayer from me; they expected comfort in the form of assurance of the next world, of God's plan, of all the usual declarations of Christian faith and goodness in the face of horror. But with every crippled man and child I saw, every broken piece of flesh, I found my mouth was more and more set tight. How could there be any comfort to be found there? I was angry and growing angrier.

After three or more days, Charles Decrucq had still not returned from the mine. Hannah was beside herself; she sat by the entrance of their hut and could do nothing but stare absently in front of her and wring her hands. I felt sure that he would return, and I told her this, but she seemed not to hear me. Her boys threw themselves into the rescue mission, spending the day at the mine, where men were digging slowly toward the tunnel, where they thought they might be able to reach whoever was trapped, if there were any survivors. There were rumors that the rescuers had heard shouts and tapping from inside the tunnel. The boys thought that perhaps they, being small, could wriggle into passages that grown men could not enter, so they hung back and waited for their moment. They supplied the digging men with fresh tools and lamps refilled with kerosene, and remained there through the night.

I was coming back from a trip to the mine on what must have been the day after the explosion. The sky was a gentle pink, unearthly, like the sky before a storm. I stopped on the trail between the mine and the village and turned, looking around me. To the west the sun was disappearing fast; the sky darkened by degrees every few seconds, a visible and invisible change: pink to mauve to nearly purple, a beauty complete and indifferent, as breathtaking a sunset as I had seen in weeks.

I often watched the sunset in the Borinage, having discovered early on that it was one of the few opportunities to see bright color, particularly in the winter months, which seemed to last forever. Perhaps because of the drabness of the landscape, or the chemicals in the air, the sunsets were often spectacular. I'd watch them up by the Denises' house, or on the fence by the mine, enjoying the contrast between the heavenly delights and the earthly toil. That evening, though, I saw something else written in the sky: The sunset was a taunt, it was a pair of eyes looking down and laughing. I stood for a moment, looking at the streak of deep purple turning to red, and I felt only rage.

As I turned back to the path, I saw Madame Dubois, Angeline's mother, who was hurrying toward the mine. Immediately it rushed over me: Angeline! Where was she?

Her mother looked haggard and drugged, her face drawn and pale. “Madame Dubois,” I said, stopping before her. I had no words to follow those.

“Any news, Pastor Vincent?” Her tone was pleading and desperate, and I knew then that some part of her family was lost. I blinked, and a silent cry shot through me: Lord, not Angeline.

“They're still digging,” I said, and then my throat knotted against my words: “Who is missing?”

She looked at me with great sorrow and, I felt sure, with pity and a flash of anger. How could I ask her such a thing? How could I not already know the answer? Her eyes filled with tears. Her mouth opened to speak and then she closed it again and shook her head. She covered her mouth with her hand, looking at the ground, the tears spilling over her eyelids and falling to the dry earth. I reached out and rested my hand on her shoulder. I knew, of course, what she would say; maybe I had known it since I first felt the tremor in the earth. Maybe all of my frenzied fever in the last hours had been so that I would not have to be confronted, like this, with what she was about to say, and with what I already knew.

“Both of them,” she whispered, her eyes still lowered. “Both of my girls are gone.”

January 26

Dear Theo,

There is something that ties me to this earth; there is more than something. I want to declare this and let this be. A good Christian would take comfort in his unworthiness, perhaps; a good Christian feels this unworthiness and offers it up to God. Thomas à Kempis says in his
Imitation of Christ
, “Learn to be unknown and be glad to be considered despicable and as nothing.” We are to despise the world, we are to withdraw from earthly things, we are to consider ourselves unworthy and as nothing, and in so doing we are to grow closer to God; we are to surrender, we are to ascend to the kingdom of Heaven. Presumably there is a point in all this struggling where a man can let go, where he fully surrenders his own will, and this is the point at which he begins to find peace. But I have never been able to find this place. Always at the end of my writhing and cudgeling there is a string that holds on, holds on, grips this world so tightly that it cannot be severed save, I suppose, in death, and who really knows if even then. And there is always a voice in me that says that God does not disapprove; that loving the world is a way to God as well. Do any of us, really, have any purpose here except a passing through on our way to the next world? And if not, why all this beauty, why all this pain, why even the sense of hatred that curls my hands into fists and sets my teeth against one another as if they were enemies?

It is only some days that I don't feel confused about this.

The woodpecker digs its beak into the bark. His beak is like a drill; he pokes violently at the tree. It seems arbitrary, but it can't be, for he comes up with a grub. What I mean to say is that what seems aimless is not. And perhaps a man should trust his instincts. Somehow I feel that there is a purpose to this writing, that at the end of all these words there is something to find, a grub to discover in the grass. Perhaps if I look closely enough at what has passed, I will find in the prism of it the seed of what comes next. Did you think you could come visit and learn anything in a few hours, in a day? When you've visited for a life already and learned nothing?

I am trying to get to a place where it does not pain me to say what I mean. It is hard to tell this story; I hope that much is clear. Here I am, months after your visit, and I have not reached the end. My words are fighting with my anger and my hurt wants to turn away from you forever. I approach the page again and again. I want to explain; I want not to have to explain.

Dear Theo,

One day not too many months ago, in September perhaps, I was sitting by the entrance to the Marcasse mine with pencil and paper, sketching what I saw: a thin tree, the men coming out of the gate.

Across the yard I saw a miner making his way to the pit. He was an older man, bent and shuffling, reporting for another day of work, his body carrying him through its routine as it had for so many years, a vessel to bring him through his day and what more? He was wearing the regulation linen work clothes and a vest made of burlap sacking, and as he moved across my line of sight I saw that there was something written on the back of him. Already, before I saw what the word was, I was pleased by this, and thought for a second that it might be my imagination, for if my mind had its way there would be words on all of our backs. What would the word be if I were inventing it? I stood and moved a few steps closer, peering after him to see my own mind reveal itself, and when the word came into focus, I staggered back. Written across the old man's back as he made his way to the yawning mouth of the mine waiting to swallow him was this word, clear as water, in red capital letters:
FRAGILE
.

The man moved across the ground with his label, “Fragile,” and the earth swallowed him, and it would have been so no matter the word on his back.

I spoke of that man to everyone who would listen, but when I described him to other miners, they nearly always looked at me with confused expressions: Yes, so what? It was as it has often been with me: I open my mouth to explain what I see and it is as if what comes out of me is a flurry of bees. People turn their heads and swat at their faces in confusion; they run from me, because why would you stay near a man who carries a beehive in his mouth?

February 6

Dear Theo,

Decrucq was recovered alive from the earth; Angeline and her sister never were. Decrucq, the man who claimed that the mines could not kill him, was proved right once again. The mine wanted the flesh of young women more than the tough old bones of a man hardened by its own air.

I lay in my hut as if I, too, were dead. Though it shames me to write it, I must tell you: Our baby brother Vincent appeared, wearing a shimmering nightshirt, hovering near the ceiling, waiting for me to address him. He did not speak. It had been at least a year since he had visited me—the last time was in Amsterdam, near the end, when exhaustion had a hold of me and I knew I could not go on. Please do not think I am mad for seeing him; I could, of course, not tell you about him, which might be more sane, but if I am to tell it all, if I am to trust you with it, he was there.

I thought of you, in a gallery in Goupil's, so far from me it was as if you were across an ocean. The phrase from Michelet repeated in my mind: “We are today what we were yesterday.”

After a week or so, Decrucq back in his bed and tended to by Hannah, the rescue party gave up, backed away from the mine with their picks and shovels, and added the names of the missing to the names of the dead. Angeline Dubois and her sister, Francesca, lights in their eyes, skin like rosy petals, extinguished somewhere below the surface of the earth, swallowed back into the original dark womb. No one looked for them anymore; their mother would never see their bodies to wish them a proper farewell; there could be no burial because their burial had already occurred. Were they together when they died? Did they clasp each other's hands in the darkness? Did they share a moment of peace or fellowship before the end? Were they crushed quickly, or was death prolonged, air slowly diminishing, delicate bodies twisted awkwardly in spaces not meant for bodies? I imagined every scenario: timbers entering flesh, ladders bent and crumbling, visitations from Heaven and Hell. Angeline's death became the vision that I lived inside of.

Madame Denis brought me food, ducking into the dark of my hut and clucking over me. When I could not respond to her, she left me milk and warm bread on a tray. In my delirium, I did not know that I ate.

*   *   *

Hubert Aert came to my hut one morning just past dawn to tell me of the strike. I don't know how many days I had been lying there; when Hubert knocked, it was the sound of someone alive knocking in the depths of the earth.

It must have been sometime in May. I was delirious from hunger, and the absence of sleep had turned all my waking moments to a dream. Baby Vincent hovered by my ears and whispered to me: I was no good, I had killed her because I had touched her, because everything I touched went wrong. I no longer knew what I believed in, and without this I no longer knew anything. If a man knows nothing, he is lost.

Cricket the bird lay dead on the bottom of his cage; I do not know if he died of natural causes or because I had ceased to feed him.

I lay on the floor as if in a grave, and Hubert said my name again, and again, and consciousness began to return to me; in confusion I began to perceive the light in the room, streaming through the dirty window onto the floor near my feet, I began to understand that the man now crouching near to me was not an apparition. Hubert placed his hand on my shoulder; his palm was rough but warm and with it came a charge of life. When Lazarus was summoned, did he have a choice but to respond?