The Season of Migration (28 page)

In the dim water closet of a poorly lit pub, he splashes water onto his face and squints at himself in the mirror over the sink. He blinks and slaps his cheeks, trying to restore himself. Between one blink and the next he has the face of a baby, and then the face of a man. His cheeks are drawn in and sunken, his beard ragged and dark. He tries to scrub off the dirt of three days on dusty roads, thinking of his brother's face when he sees him at the door. When the dirt comes free his skin is pink and mottled, protesting the sudden attention.

There is not much he can do about the state of his clothes or his boots. He hits himself all over, the dust rising off of him in clouds that make him cough. The leather of the toe of his boot is now completely loose and flopping with every step. He remembers the kindness of Bertha and James at the pub in Busigny; perhaps this place will have more cardboard for him to slip into his shoes.

Back out at the bar, he takes a seat and says, “Coffee, please” to the bartender. They are the first words he has spoken in almost two days, and it surprises him that his voice sounds as it always has. He has a few cents left from a farmer the day before who took pity on him and gave him a few pence as well as a hard-boiled egg in exchange for a sketch of a wheelbarrow. The bartender brings him the coffee in a thick ceramic mug, which he puts both of his hands around gratefully. He sits there, his back against the bar, looking out into the room. His body is exhausted and grateful to be stationary, his legs faintly tingling as they relax. His mind is quiet; he sits there, sipping his coffee, enjoying the bitter taste of it so thoroughly that he is barely aware of his surroundings at all.

The room is small and dim, with only a few tables around the bar and a pool table in the back next to a fireplace. The afternoon sunlight comes through the dirty windows in muted arrows, cutting across Vincent's field of vision in strange golden screens that cast themselves onto and illuminate the surfaces they touch in fine detail. The room is paneled in wood and smells of earth, musty and close, like the miners' huts. It is lunchtime, he realizes; a bearded man in shirtsleeves eats a cut of meat with potatoes at one of the tables. At another table, a different man, with a large and circular bald spot and a bushy mustache that curls over his cheeks, eats a baked potato and slurps from a cup of soup. There is no noise save for the men chewing and the bartender tinkering behind the bar, setting down glasses and cleaning them with a white rag. On the pool table in the back, a cat is methodically swishing its tail back and forth, back and forth, silently, as if it might do so until the end of time.

Vincent's stomach growls as he watches the men eat, and the movement in his body stirs his consciousness. His coffee is warm against his palms and he sips it, slowly waking his body and his mind. He feels peaceful and relaxed; he is not thinking of his mission, of where he still must go, of the possibility that it will not turn out well. His body, in movement for days, has come to a stop, strangely, perfectly, in this room. He sits and watches the men slowly eat, a swirl of insects dancing in the cut of sun. Perhaps this is where he has been traveling to, these days, all those footsteps; perhaps this has been his destination all along. The men seem not to notice him as he gazes at them; they are perfectly peaceful in their solitude, sharing a meal with their parallel thoughts.

He remembers the visit he made in July to the Reverend Pieterszen. When he arrived at Pieterszen's house, Pieterszen's daughter came to the door. She was maybe seven, wearing a pink frock with lace around its edges, a ribbon in her hair, and no shoes. Her eyes went from Vincent's waist, where her gaze was level, up to his face and down again before she gave a terrified shriek and turned and ran from the door. Children always see more than the rest of us can, he thought; had he been a tramp, come to her door for charity, no doubt she would have received him with warmth. He thought instead that she could see straight through, beyond his appearance, to his anguish and confusion and doubt; it was that—not his rotted shoes, matted hair, or the hungry angle of his cheekbones—that made her scream.

Pieterszen came to the door soon after, his arm around the girl. When he saw Vincent, his face at first was heightened with confusion, his eyebrows furrowed at the sight of such a filthy creature at his door, and then his expression melted into softness and warmth.

“Vincent!” he said, “How lovely to see you! Come in, please, come in.” He stood to the side and gestured widely with his arm into the darkness of the hall. His daughter looked up at him with fear, as if he had invited in a bear. “Don't worry, Roos,” he said, “it's my friend Vincent come to see us!”

After supper, he and Pieterszen sat in Pieterszen's study with cups of coffee. Vincent's body refreshed and his mind somewhat restored, he was able to take in the room as he couldn't when he first arrived; there were prints covering the walls, as well as a few studies in ink and watercolor that were clearly Pieterszen's own. Vincent stood and moved around the room, examining them. Landscapes, primarily, many of them by Pieterszen's favorite painter Schelfhout and his student Hoppenbrouwers, as well as a few portraits of peasant women and clergymen. The studies that seemed most recently hung were of a particular figure that Pieterszen was struggling to get right—a woman sitting somberly on a stool.

“It's my wife,” Pieterszen said from behind Vincent, answering the question he had not asked.

Vincent smiled. “I was just about to ask.”

“I can't get it quite right. I'm beginning to think it's because I'm too close to her; perhaps I will never be satisfied with her portrait. I paint her, and the image is accurate, but there is something missing.”

Vincent stood back from the wall and looked at the studies of Pieterszen's wife. There were three of them, and they were very much the same. In each of them she wore an expression so blank that it was as if her face erased itself; you would be looking at her and already forgetting that you were doing so. It was as if she were a representation of the human race rather than a member of it.

Technically, however, the paintings were nearly expert, just as his landscapes were. If Vincent had not just sat at table with his wife, he would not have found anything to be missing in the painting, but would only have wondered at the represented woman's vapidity. He wondered of Pieterszen's work just what he wondered of his hero, Schelfhout: Could perfection be a flaw?

Pieterszen was clearly a serious artist. Vincent knew he was in the presence of someone who understood the world of pictures. This was why he had come.

“Reverend,” he said, “would you take a look at the drawings I brought with me?”

Pieterszen looked surprised. “I'd be honored,” he said.

Vincent brought them to him. That little package that he had lugged all that way, so meager in his hands as he laid it in Pieterszen's. Why had he brought it? What strange impulse had made him tuck it under his arm and come here? He needed to show them to someone, to show someone what he had seen, what he had been through.

Pieterszen opened the little package and looked through the drawings very slowly, taking time to examine each one. Vincent stood over him and watched the drawings pass through his hands, reliving them in his eyes: the men leaving the mine; the wives bending under their sacks of coal; the landscape in winter, with its black trees over white snow and the gray slag heap looming; the studies of Angeline's father, of Madame Denis, of Angeline herself. Angeline! Hair pulled back, cross-legged beside the lantern, little smile, frenzied outline, head just a bit too big; looking at it, he felt his whole body tremble, hearing the sacred silence of that night in his hut, and seeing her body now crushed somewhere underground.

Pieterszen didn't speak until he had looked through them all. Then he lifted his head, to find Vincent anxiously hovering. “Well, Vincent,” he said, “I can see that these drawings have been born out of deep love. I can see that you have a keen eye, and a respect for representing what you see with absolute honesty.”

Vincent sat in the chair opposite him. “Thank you,” he said, barely able to get the words out.

“I wonder if you've had any training?”

For a moment, Vincent thought he meant in evangelism, and he felt a flash of rage. But this was not what Pieterszen meant. “In drawing?” Vincent shook his head. “No.”

He nodded. “I thought not. Your perspective is amateur, and there's a rawness to your figures that needs work.”

Vincent nodded. There was no question about this. They were crude, shoddy studies, barely anything more than scribbles.

“But I do see something in these drawings, Vincent,” Pieterszen said. He rose from his chair, leaving all the drawings on the seat but one, which he brought with him to prop against the wall, near the studies of his wife. It was the drawing of Angeline.

“I don't really understand it,” he said, standing back from the drawing. “Somehow you've captured something in this drawing that I haven't been able to capture in so many attempts at painting my wife! Your technique is crude, and you've drawn this woman, I'm sure, nothing like what she actually looks like. Yet there is something here, something I can't quite identify. I feel like I understand something about this woman.” He was talking at the wall, as if he were addressing the drawing itself. He paused. “I can't figure it out,” he said.

Vincent remained silent. The idea that he might have succeeded in capturing anything at all of Angeline before she left the earth stole his speech.

“Well,” Pieterszen said, still addressing the wall, “it's character, I suppose. Your drawing lacks precision, but it has
personality.
My painting presents a perfect picture, but I've removed all the individuality.”

He took the drawing off the wall and came back to his chair. He was smiling. “I daresay I could learn a thing or two from you, Vincent my boy.”

Just before Vincent left the house the next morning, Pieterszen handed back his drawings, but he kept the one of Angeline in his hands. “Might I keep this one, Vincent?” he asked. “I'd like to study it.”

He thinks of this now, remembers the elation he felt when he left Pieterszen's house, wearing the boots that the reverend had given him, the ones still on his feet now, worn-out and torn; that feeling of hope, crushed so soon after by Theo's visit and the awful visit to their parents' house. Now he feels a sudden burst of clarity: the scene in front of him is a palette of browns and a swath of golden yellow; it is Rembrandt's
The Holy Family in the Evening
, the golden light illuminating the travelers, the lonely men at their meals just as holy as the painted family beneath the window lit by the sun. It strikes him with force, the scene in front of him taking on a sudden and definite holiness; he looks around him with pleasure and awe. The room begins to sparkle, to tingle and glow. He sits there on his stool with his coffee and feels a surge of love: for the men before him, for the quiet bartender behind the bar, for the room itself, the supreme pleasure of being there. This is God, he thinks, right here. This is life; this is my life. I am witness.

He takes out his paper and sketches each of the men, sitting at their tables, clutching their forks and spoons, the cat on the pool table, and then a still life, the items in front of him on the wooden bar: mug, beer tap, bartender's rag. The drawings are composed simply, the subject at the center of the page, each one a simple rendering of what he sees, and he is pleased with them. When his mug is empty, he allows the bartender to refill it, nodding at him as he does so. There are no words in this pub, he thinks. This is a sacred, wordless place.

*   *   *

He has the address written on a torn piece of paper that is folded into four squares and resides in his pocket. This address, just a few words and a couple of numbers, represents where his brother has been all this time. Vincent has it memorized by now, having stared at it for many long hours in his room in the Borinage, trying to imagine the place it represented, trying to imagine his brother's life without him.

Before he leaves the pub, he asks the bartender how to get to his brother's house. The bartender tells him; it is still an hour or so from where he is now, but he is grateful to have a little more time to himself.

He steps out of the pub into the afternoon sunshine. He feels a far more coherent man than he had when he arrived just an hour or two before; it is as if his outlines have been restored, his body once again visible and in human form. The coffee has given him some energy, and he feels a renewed vigor in his legs, which still ache but are no longer crying out in pain. In his excitement inside the bar he forgot to tend to his feet; they will carry him nonetheless.

He walks. He walks past vegetable stands and boys with newspapers and little girls selling flowers out of large baskets, past crowds of people at outdoor cafés, past parks and along the river, where thin boats float gracefully and women with white gloves and hats tied under their chins with ribbons laugh with their heads thrown back. It has turned into a beautiful day, and all of Paris is outside to enjoy it.

He passes by a gallery: in the window, unknown landscapes, seascapes, women in bathing dresses by rolling waves, a dog playing in the surf. Pieterszen would like these paintings, he thinks. Would Theo?

He thinks of the letters in his knapsack: Will they make a difference to Theo? Will they explain anything to him? He remembers Theo's visit so vividly; he remembers how his mouth clamped shut over his words, how he could not answer Theo through his cloud of fury.
You are not the same any longer.
He hears the phrase again and he feels his face flush.

What will Theo say when he arrives at his door? What will he see, about everything, that Vincent cannot see? He tries to think as Theo might: If their places were reversed, would he feel a failure?