The Season of Migration (7 page)

He walks on, thinking of those children in that circle behind him, unfazed by his presence, just another man on a road. It will be dark soon, and he will need to find somewhere to sleep. What will those children turn into? Their parents, no doubt, the keepers of their family's land, the bearers of babies and future land keepers, and on and on into the future. Alard will become a baker; the miner boys will become miners. None of them will break from the flock; none of them will ask, most likely, what they are meant for, because the path for them is clear.

He thinks of Angeline, in his hut, her eyes pleading and sad;
Monsieur Vincent, will you tell me of other places?
Angeline, who wanted a different future for herself but did not find one.

*   *   *

He stops and gazes at a glowing field. His body is aching from the walking and the recent bout with fever in the farmer's barn after the storm, and as he stands, watching the last raindrops on the field catch the moonlight and glisten, he feels the chorus of aches in his body as music. He is looking over the field while a symphony plays in his ears. The music is melancholy and sad; then it is threatening, the pain in his legs rising at the sudden stasis. The field glints and shines; it seems to glimmer from within its very soil. He imagines a hole opening up in the center, blooming, growing, beckoning him to crawl inside.

Who is he without his brother? Who is a man without the skin he lives inside?

Then, his father's voice: Who is a man without a goal, a pursuit, a vocation?

Gradually he becomes aware of a cow, standing nearby, its nose in the grass and chewing. The cow does not notice him, or does not care. There is a haystack nearby where the cow is standing, and Vincent moves slowly over to it and sinks down. He wants to be near the beast for a moment, wants the simple animal to silence the voices in his head. He has always loved the sound of large animals chewing—the muffled crunching, the lap of the giant tongue, the snorting of the nostrils as big as his fists, the deep bass of the breathing into the grass. There is something joyous about it, something simple and joyous. It is the sound of a need being met, the sound of desire fulfilled, and yet it is more than that. It is the sound of patience, the sound of no rush, the sound of natural time, of no thought, of pure existence. It is the sound of the way things are.

He takes his stack of paper from his pocket and smoothes it against his knee. Watching the cow intently, listening to the sound of it chewing, he attempts to draw what he sees: the curve of the animal's back, the shape of its face, a distorted figure eight. He is frustrated that the drawing cannot contain the sound that he is hearing.

He draws the tail flung out from the body, wishing to capture its motion, the casual, content swing from side to side, an expression of the cow's satisfaction. The cow stands for its portrait without protest, only occasionally raising its eyes to take in the man crouching before it. What might an animal understand of a man's instinct to capture what he sees?

He remembers one night not too long ago in the Borinage, when he witnessed the birth of a calf in a stable. The expression on the mother's face was strained, her eyes threatening to burst from their sockets, her teeth bared. It was the middle of the night, and there was a girl there, a brown peasant face with a white nightcap. She had tears of compassion in her eyes for the poor cow when the animal went into labor and was having great difficulty. Vincent stood toward the back of the room, taking in the scene and imagining how it could be painted by Correggio: a black background, the cow illuminated from the center of the image as if from the inside, the moment of the calf's birth like the birth of an angel; or by Millet: an ominous sky, the calf birthed outside in a field, a peasant woman in an apron bending over to receive the animal; or by Israëls: the barn rendered in browns the same color as the cow, the peasant girl in the corner with red circles of blush on her cheeks barely visible except if one was to look closely. When the calf was born, wriggling on the stable floor in a casing of sticky liquid, the farmer turned to Vincent. His eyes questioned him: What was he doing there? What did he have to offer? Vincent stood forward and uttered a line from John 11:40, “Jesus said to her, Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” but his words sounded hollow to his ears in the face of that calf wriggling on the ground. He saw the farmer's eyes roll over him, taking in his shabby clothes, his bare feet, and a familiar mixture of shame and defiance swept over him. He had been seeing that look more and more from the people of the Borinage. Yet in front of them was that newborn miracle, and surely this outweighed the judgments of men? He said nothing more, but took in the details of the image before him—the slick membrane that surrounded the calf, the way the mother immediately moved her body to lick the animal that had just come from inside of her, and always that little peasant girl in the corner, quietly watching.

He folds the sketch and reaches for his knapsack to put it away. With the bag open, he peers in at the stack of letters on the bottom. His heart speeds up at the prospect of touching them, remembering the possibility that they may no longer be readable. The labor of all these months of silence! He is nearly amazed that the stack is so small, holding as it does so many months of time. He reaches in and pulls the letters out; the stack is intact, still bound by the twine, and as he pages through he is relieved to see that the words look legible. He sits there, holding his voice in his hands, and watches the cow.

Something about the animal kingdom, he thinks; respite from the burden of choice, perhaps, or the capacity for wonder. He is grateful. The animal is fuel for him, the intact letters a message that he should continue on.

*   *   *

In the deep of night, his body exhausted, he lies down in a pile of discarded hay near a locked barn—not quite a bale, but enough of a pile that he tells himself there will be some warmth there.

He lies looking up at the sky. The sky is stunning, the stars spread across it in an ancient twinkling language, the moon exerting its bright dominion, giving permission to the smaller stars to shine. It occurs to him that he hasn't seen the sky like this in a good many months—in the Borinage, there is too thick a layer of soot between the ground and the sky for the firmament to reveal itself. Is this why it is so hard to dream in that land?

He watches the stars and a feeling of peace comes over him. His body aches, his muscles tense and tingling; he brings his mind to each part of him and wills it to quiet. Shoulders, neck, stomach, hands, thighs, toes: Piece by piece he calms himself, sinking farther into the hay. It's a technique he used to use when he was a boy, coming in after a long walk on the heath and being sent straight to bed, his body still walking and Theo already asleep. How do you calm a creature that will not be calmed? You hold it close and speak softly to it.

He thinks of Angeline, her body close to his, the curve of her neck where it met her shoulder just visible in the flickering lamplight. A sharp pain jabs in his chest. He tries not to think of her—it is not
productive
, he hears his father say—but the last portrait he made of her floats up behind his eyes: repeated nervous lines back and forth over one another in a frenzy of movement, revealing jaw, neck, head a bit too large for her shoulders, round shape of knee, her cheek half in shadow and somehow glowing pink even without an application of color. The image trembles in his mind just as the sight of her trembled in the light of the lantern, ghostlike and ephemeral, yet undeniable, alive. Where is the picture now? Reverend Pieterszen's house, propped up in his study in front of his easy chair, next to unfinished portraits of his wife. Somewhere in the world, Angeline looks out over a room—unwavering gaze, bemused expression. He hears her voice, soft and inquisitive:
Monsieur Vincent, is that you?

He wills himself to stop thinking of her—
Stop!
—and closes his mind over the thought of her like the lid of a trunk. In her place comes Theo—another apparition he doesn't want to abide.

His brother's August visit nine months ago comes back to him in painful detail. He tries to will it away, but it returns. He had stood for hours waiting for Theo's train—he was so excited about his arrival that he had gotten there far too early. For hours, he leaned against the wall of the train station, watching the tracks. A cluster of people stood near, chatting and cooling themselves, waving their hands and their hats and their unfurled fans at their faces. Every few minutes one of the men stepped closer to the tracks and leaned out, peering down the line and watching for distant movement. The women's fans, constantly moving, fluttering like the wings of butterflies, were flapping patches of color—purple, blue, and pink—against the train station's landscape, grays and dusty browns as far as the eye could see. Vincent watched and imagined them taking flight, the women grasping after them as they took wing and flew away, and then the women floating up after them.

Despite the heat, he kept his hat pulled down low, not wanting to make eye contact. He chewed on his unlit pipe, then slipped it into his pocket to save it from his teeth; then, when the train still did not arrive, he took it out again to chew some more.

After what seemed an eternity, a train approached, a plume of white smoke unfurling and then dissipating in the air. The steady chug of the engine grew louder, the snake of the train curved around the track and grew larger, the people on the platform hushed in anticipation, the fans halted in midair, and then the train carrying Vincent's brother Theo rumbled into the station.

Vincent had not seen his brother in eight months, though after all that had happened in mining country, it felt a lot longer than that. Years had passed in the last eight months, centuries. But there he was, Theo, stepping down from the train with his valise, looking trim and professional in a slick black suit and tie, wearing his top hat despite the heat, and instead of elation, as Vincent had always felt when glimpsing his brother, he felt trepidation. A sort of dread swept over him as he watched Theo disembark. Who was that slim young man stepping down the metal stairs in dapper polished shoes? Theo had always been thin and sickly, pasty white even in the height of summer, often bedridden with illnesses caught at school that spared most everyone else. This man, however, seemed too healthy, his dark suit fitting perfectly across his narrow shoulders. He wore his brother's face—Vincent could see a version of that face on a young boy, his mouth smeared with the juice of plums, grinning up at him with crooked teeth—but the clothes of a man he did not know.

Vincent peered at his brother from the far end of the platform and felt tempted to hide. Theo had not yet seen him; he could still duck through the station door and avoid whatever message Theo might be bringing. But then he caught himself in his fear and chastised himself: Theo was here! His brother, despite all, in the flesh. He ran to him, ducking around the other reuniting passengers, and called his name.

Theo turned and saw Vincent, and his face broke into the smile that Vincent remembered, wide and goofy; Vincent's fear flew from him. Theo took off his hat and waited for his brother to reach him. They shook hands and embraced, and Vincent clasped his brother's thin frame and inhaled the familiar scent of him—a little sweet and a little musty, like a basket of raspberries shut in a cellar.

Theo told him right away that he didn't have much time. Pulling back from their embrace, he said, “I'm on my way to Paris; I have sent my luggage on ahead. They are expecting me there for work tomorrow morning, so I must catch the evening train. I'm sorry that only leaves us the afternoon.”

Vincent, who had hoped Theo would at least spend the night, tried to hide his disappointment. The first words out of his brother's mouth were to put a limit on their time. “Of course!” he said, trying to accompany his voice with a smile. “We'll make the most of it.”

Back in Vincent's room in Cuesmes—in the house of Monsieur Frank, an evangelist, and his wife, Grace—Theo asked Vincent about the pile of sketches on the table by the bed; Vincent showed them to him one by one, kneeling by the chair where Theo sat smoking his pipe, explaining each in turn. “That's a mining man,” he said of a drawing of an old man wearing a burlap sack and smoking a pipe; “they often wear sacking as clothing for an extra layer of warmth.” “And that's my friend Alard,” he said of a sketch of a boy throwing a ball; “we used to share a room in the Denis house.”

Theo was quiet; interested but reserved, asking questions but saying nearly nothing in response. Vincent chattered on, filling the silence, but all the while wondering whether something was wrong with Theo, or if perhaps this was just the way he was now. In the last year or so, Theo had become a success in the art-dealing world; perhaps along with his professional success had come a refining of personality, so all his rough edges had been permanently smoothed. In the past, their visits had been filled with gaiety and laughter; today, Theo was like a man with a terrible piece of news to unload who dared not speak it loud.

On their way back to Mons, a walk of over an hour, they went by the disused mine La Sorcière: buildings crumpled and leaning, wooden beams jutting here and there, birds flying in and out of windows. “Theo,” Vincent asked as they moved toward the mine, “is anything wrong? I've been talking ever since you got here, and you have said hardly anything. Is everything all right in your life?”

Theo, his pipe still lit, shook his head. They stood looking out over the abandoned mine. He took his pipe in his hand and held it, a twisting line of smoke rising from it. “No,” he said, “nothing is wrong. My life is good; I have everything I could ask for. I feel very lucky.”

“Well, good!” said Vincent. “Of course I am happy to hear it.” He looked at his brother's face. Theo was smoking his pipe again, looking at a turned-over mine cart in the field next to them, his forehead furrowed. “But you do seem gloomy. I'm not sure I've made you laugh once since you arrived.”